Asghar Zaidi - Well-Being of Older People in Ageing Societies

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Well-being of Older People in Ageing Societies

Public Policy and Social Welfare
A Series Edited by the European Centre

European Centre Vienna

Volume 30

Asghar Zaidi

Well-being of Older People in Ageing Societies

First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright European Centre Vienna, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Copy-editing and DTP: Willem Stamatiou
European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research
Berggasse 17, 1090 Vienna, Austria

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-7596-9 (pbk)

Dedicated to my mother
(1927 - 2000)

I have great pleasure in acknowledging many people who helped me in the completion of this work. First and foremost, my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor, Tony Atkinson, who provided insightful comments on all individual chapters. His careful reading, combined with his rigorous and thorough advice, have refined key areas of the research presented here. Enormous thanks also to two other referees of this work, Mary Gregory and Holly Sutherland, for their forbearance in reading and commenting different versions. Their comments helped greatly in improving the research reported here.

I am grateful for support from colleagues at the European Centre Vienna, particularly Bernd Marin and Willem Stamatiou. I am also very grateful to colleagues at the London School of Economics, in particular Jane Falkingham and Katherine Rake - with whom the work reported in benefited from research collaborations with Tania on a paper of the same topic.

I have also called on a number of friends for intellectual, technical and practical assistance. I would like particularly to thank my cricket mate Sean Terry from Oxford Brookes University who provided extremely valuable help in proof-reading the individual chapters at several stages of my research, and also in keeping me organised and enthusiastic (and laughing). Many thanks to my wife, Kiran, who has offered support throughout.

The views expressed in the book are those of the author, and neither the OECD nor the other organisations with which the author is affiliated carry any responsibility with regard to data used and interpretations made. The author takes full responsibility for any remaining errors and omissions.

Contents

Chapter 1
Introduction

Chapter 2
Conceptualising Well-being of Older People

Chapter 3
Methodological Choices in Measuring Well-being

Chapter 4
The British Pension and Social Benefit System

Chapter 5
Coupling of Disadvantages: An Assessment of Income Deprivation and Limiting Health in Old Age

Chapter 6
Income Mobility in Old Age

(jointly with Katherine Rake and Jane Falkingham)

Chapter 7
Snakes and Ladders : Covariates of Income Mobility in Old Age

(jointly with Klaas de Vos)

Chapter 9
Synthesizing Discussion and Conclusions

Guide

Figures

Tables

Boxes

Part I:
Setting the Context

Chapter 1
Introduction

The ageing process begins at the moment of birth and ends at death. While ageing, we experience a distinctive lifecourse trajectory, and yet we can identify some common stages of life. Shakespeare, in his seven ages of man, identified life stages ranging from the 'mewling and puking' babe to a rather graphically, if negatively, portrayed 'sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything' old person (As You Like it, Act II). Hinduism identifies four life stages - from early age, at which to pursue chaste studentship, through to the age at which signs of ageing appear - when a man has seen the sons of his sons. Rowntree (1902) was amongst the first social scientists to formalise the concept of alternating life stages and the economic and social attributes of these stages - ranging from early childhood (where economic dependency is a given) to the time when the man is too old to work (and thus at risk of being in poverty).

So, we all begin in childhood, and face the experiences of adolescence and coming of age, and of growing old. By passing through all these different phases of life, and accumulating life experiences along the way, we end up living in old age. The focus of research undertaken in this book is the old-age phase of life, and this emphasis on the subgroup of older people is motivated by some stylised facts of our contemporary world;

• Rising longevity. It is less unusual nowadays to make it through to old age, a fact largely attributable to a combination of advances in public health (e.g. water purification and improved sanitation), medical technology (e.g. treatment of heart and lung diseases) and improving standards of living (e.g. better nutrition). This rise in human life expectancy is rated, quite justifiably, as one of the most remarkable advances of recent times. Thus, the fact that we spend an increasingly longer time of our life in older age makes it more important to gain a holistic understanding of the level of the economic and social resources available to us in old age and of the dynamics of resources during this phase of later life.
• Interlinkage with earlier phases of life: The dual systems of social insurance and social assistance in modern welfare states play an important role in determining older people's entitlements to pension rights. Individual entitlements in old age are, in general, linked with experiences during earlier phases of life, such as the labour market association, marital association with someone in the labour market, child and adult care responsibilities, and residence in the country. Thus, an evaluation of personal welfare in old age offers us insights into how differential experiences of earlier phases of life and their treatment by the welfare system impact upon resources available in old age.
• Current environment of population ageing: During the latter part of the past century, the trend in longevity has been accompanied by a drop in fertility rates, a factor attributable largely to advances in the emancipation of women. Together, these trends continue to shift the distribution of the population in most developed countries in such a way that the ratio of elderly to non-elderly people, and therefore the average age of the population, is rising. Nor are these trends likely to abate in the near future, so that societies experiencing this demographic shift - commonly referred to as ageing societies - now face new challenges, new policy directions. In this environment, a substantive research focus on older people's resources is imperative so as to design effective social and economic policies to guard against the unprecedented rise in public social expenditures and avoid the moral hazard of poverty in old age.

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