Meeting the challenge of population ageing

doi:10.1136/bmj.b3926

Published 5 October 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b3926
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b3926

Analysis

Meeting the challenge of population ageing

Yvonne Doyle, regional director of public health¹, Martin McKee, professor of European public health²^,3, Bernd Rechel, researcher²^,3, Emily Grundy, professor of demographic gerontology³

¹ NHS South East Coast, Horley, Surrey RH6 7DE, ² European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies , ³ London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Correspondence to: Y Doyle yvonne.doyle@southeastcoast.nhs.uk

Increased longevity poses a challenge to the welfare state,but the problems can be overcome, argue Yvonne Doyle and colleagues

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The welfare state is based on a life course that no longer matchescurrent experience. It assumes that people, or at least menand unmarried women, spend their early years in education andthen go on to a long period in work followed by a short periodin retirement, when they live off the pension accumulated whilein work or, more usually, the tax and pension contributionsof those still in work. At a time when many people did not surviveto draw their pensions or, if they did, survived for only afew more years, welfare systems coped reasonably well. It isless clear whether they will be able to do so in the future.The scale of the challenge is shown by a single stark statistic.If there is no change in work and retirement patterns, the ratioof workers to older inactive persons in the countries that . . . [Full text of this article]