UN’s High Fertility Projections Still Show Rapid Global Aging

by Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
Sep 17, 2011

Even with its highly optimistic fertility projections, the new UN population forecast predicts a grayer world than the one imagined by its 2009 report which used much lower fertility estimates.

Perhaps most significant is the steep rise in society’s proportion of the old (65 years or older) and very old (80 years and older). By 2050, these groups will be 2 percent more of the population in Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the UK, and the US than previously estimated.

Whereas just 7.6 percent of Chinese were old in 2005, more than a quarter of the population will be over 65 in 2050, up from a projected 20 percent in the UN’s 2009 medium variant calculation in its bi-annual population figures. In Russia and the UK, the expected percentage of elderly in 2050 has jumped from 20 to 23 percent since the last report, up from 14 percent in Russia and 16 percent in the UK in 2005. Britain’s proportion of very old is now projected to have doubled from 2005 to 2050 and reach 9 percent, up from a projected 7.7 percent in the 2009 report. the rest image by Francisco Osorio