Ageing in Emerging Markets

Green Templeton College, Oxford, 2015

The rise of emerging markets in the last half century has been associated with violent shifts in the tectonic plates of demography, economics and geography. There will be larger shifts in the next half century as emerging markets are transformed by the megatrends of globalization, urbanization, digitization, climatization, ideological conflict… and longevity.

Challenges and opportunities associated with population ageing are not unique to emerging markets. But like those associated with epidemiological transitions and urbanization, they have been so compressed that some transitions spread over 150 years in high income countries will happen in just 25 years in emerging markets.

This report describes the outcomes of a 2015 symposium on Ageing in Emerging Markets convened by the Emerging Markets Symposium at Green Templeton College, Oxford. It focuses on the causes and consequences of rising longevity in the largest and most successful emerging markets; explains why they must wake up to the realities of getting older; assesses the economic and social and health implications of population ageing; and relates ageing associated issues to the economic cultural and political diversity of emerging markets.

Ageing in Emerging Markets