The Sustainability of Ageing

Abstract

This paper examines a possible limitation of diagnoses on the problems of ageing and the sustainability of social security linked to the approach and the methodological tools used to analyze the economic consequences of ageing, and particularly its impact on financing social security.
It seeks to show the methodological inadequacy of assessing the material consequences of ageing by abstracting the economic variables with which it interacts, and which should be jointly observed, since the level of economic activity, employment and productivity are not fully independent variables of the demographic processes by which ageing occurs.
In the first part, the problem is approached through a theoretical analysis focusing on the limitations of the main tools currently used to assess the economic consequences of ageing, and some prerequisites that an appropriate methodology should fulfill are established. In the second part, an alternative methodology is developed to study the sustainability of ageing and social welfare through three new indicators, consistent with the previous analysis.
The paper contributes to rethinking the approach to the challenges of social security and ageing, and hence the search for solutions to the viability of social welfare in communities with different labour and productive contexts. In addition, it provides new methodological tools to empirically implement this approach.