George Leeson

in Older Persons in Southeast Asia (eds. Evi Nurvidya & Aris Ananta), pp. 47-67, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore, 2009.

This paper will discuss the likely changes in the composition of the population by age, sex, level of education, and health status for the whole region of Southeast Asia over the coming decades, and will show specific projections for Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. The future population trends will depend on future trends in fertility, mortality, and migration. We start by presenting population projections that explicitly consider the uncertainty in all three factors. Next, we present projections that add educational attainment as a further dimension, thus providing an outlook for human capital by age and sex. Finally, we match these projections with recently collected data from the Future of Retirement, a global ageing survey carried out by the Oxford Institute of Ageing in collaboration with HSBC on health and disability indicators by age, sex, and level of education for the four countries concerned. Together, these different pieces of analysis will give us important background information about the challenges and opportunities facing these countries in terms of the financing of ageing populations.