Population Council Projects | Comparative Study of Aging and Health in Asia

PROJECT
Comparative Study of Aging and Health in Asia

East and Southeast Asia is the most rapidly aging part of the world.

Much of this is due to swift declines in fertility and mortality over the last several decades. At the same time, Asia is changing in many other ways. Economies have been developing rapidly, levels of education have been rising, and medical resources have been expanding.

The Comparative Study of Aging and Health in Asia is a multi-country collaborative project that studies the health of older Asians within this changing environment. The study focuses on diverse settings, including Mainland China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan. It seeks to describe the health of older persons in Asia, examine trends in population health across the region, examine individual health transitions, assess the determinants of these trends and transitions, determine the policy implications of the aging of Asia, and provide comparative analyses across Asian settings.

In general, the study is finding that health trends in Asia may be distinct from those occurring in other parts of the world. For instance, in Taiwan functional limitation prevalence rates have increased throughout the 1990s. Population Council studies of mortality trends in Taiwan, however, have also shown that those with the greatest number and most severe physical functioning problems have improved their survival chances from the earlier to the latter part of the 1990s. One explanation for this improvement in mortality could be the universal health insurance program that was instituted in Taiwan in 1995, suggesting that a later life change in access to health care may have dramatic influences on health.

Location

East and Southeast Asia

Duration

2001–2005

Population Council researcher

Zachary Zimmer

Non-Council collaborators

Xianghua Fang, Zhe Tang (Capital University of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China)

Angelique Chan (National University of Singapore)

Toshiko Kaneda (Population Reference Bureau)

Ming-Cheng Chang, Yi-Li Chuang, Hui-Sheng Lin, Yu-Hsuan Lin (Taiwan Bureau of Health Promotion)

Albert Hermalin, Mary Beth Ofstedal (University of Michigan)

Grace Cruz, Josefina N. Natividad (University of the Philippines)

Alberto Palloni (University of Wisconsin)

Donors

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Population Council

US National Institutes of Health

Publications/Resources on this project