A woman
wearing traditional conical hat pushes her bicycle past a restaurant. Photo by
Reuters
Pensioners are
living out their final years in sickness and without social welfare.
According to government figures, Vietnam
currently has a total population of 93 million, and 10.5 percent of the
population is 60 or over - that's 9.8 million people.
It is forecast in the next 50 years, Vietnam
will have 10 million more in that age group.
The United Nations considers a country to be
aging when 7 percent of its population is aged 65 or over - the threshold used
to be 10 percent of a population being 60 years old or over.
Aging is happening faster than expected
Chung, at the age of 77, lives with her
74-year-old sister in a shabby house on the outskirts of Hanoi. Both women are
living out their final years in poor health and financial difficulties.
More and more Vietnamese senior citizens like
Chung and her sister are being left behind in their villages as their children
go out to the cities to earn a living.
The two old women spend half of their
combined monthly income of about VND6 million ($270) on medical services. They
have no health insurance.
Vietnam’s aging population has two distinguishing
features.
Firstly, the aging process has happened at a
much faster rate than expected.
Vietnam was expected to benefit from its
golden population over a 30-year period from 2010 to 2040 with more
economically active people, defined as those aged between 15 and 60, than
economically inactive people. However, due to a lower birthrate and longer life
expectancy, the country is aging rapidly, and the working-age population is
shrinking at pace.
The working-age population will shrink so
quickly that by 2030, one in six Vietnamese will be over 60, and by 2060, one
in four will be 60 or older, government figures show.
According to the United Nations Development
Program, Vietnam’s working-age population has increased about 50 percent in the
past 100 years, but its population aged 60 or older has soared by 300 percent.
“What took between 60 and 100 years in Europe
and North America is set to take only two or three decades in many Asia-Pacific
countries, including in Vietnam,” said Bakhodir Burkhanov, UNDP deputy country
director in Vietnam.
Vietnam’s demographic window is about to
close as its ageing process is forecast to take only 15 years. Official
statistics show that Vietnam’s population aged 60 or over has steadily
increased to the current 10.5 percent from 9 percent in 2009, 8.1 percent in
1999, 7.2 percent in 1989 and 6.9 percent in 1979.
Secondly, Vietnam’s population has aged
before it has become rich or moderately rich.
“Vietnam is one of a few countries in the
world in which the population has aged before becoming rich," said Nguyen
Trong Dam, deputy labor minister, referring to mounting constraints on the
social welfare system and health care services when it comes to any potential
solutions to take care of elderly people.
It is estimated 20 percent of Vietnamese
senior citizens aged 60 or older are currently living under the poverty line,
according to the UNDP in Vietnam, and one third of them are still working in
labor-intensive jobs with low and unstable incomes.
About 70 percent of them don’t have savings
accounts and 62.6 percent of seniors are financially insecure without monthly
pensions or social welfare benefits.
Besides, Vietnamese elders are living longer,
but they are spending more time sick, said deputy minister Dam.
The world’s average life expectancy has
increased by 21 years over the past 50 years while the life expectancy in
Vietnam has soared by 33 years to an average of 75.6.
However, the General Office for Population
and Family Planning has calculated the country’s healthy life expectancy at 60
years. That means the proportion of time Vietnamese senior citizens are living
with health problems is estimated at around 15 years. And 95 percent of them
are living with non-infectious conditions such as diabetes, high blood
pressure, strokes, osteoporosis and respiratory diseases.
The window for
action is limited
According to the UNDP, if Vietnam fails to
create jobs, develop social security and improve quality of life before aging
sets in, it will risk instability in the near future.
The aging process might end the country’s
fast economic growth, which has been above 5 percent on average since 1999, and
the Southeast Asian country’s growth is mainly fuelled by exports which rely
heavily on cheap and abundant labor.
In the near term, the UNDP suggests Vietnam
should boost productivity by lifting the mandatory retirement age, retaining
more senior people in the labor force.
Michael Herrmann, senior adviser on economics
and manager of the Innovation Fund at the United Nations Population Fund
(UNFPA), put forward three solutions at a recent workshop on the impacts of an
ageing population. He advised the government to consider a policy change that
will make Vietnamese stay in their jobs longer, invest more in human resources,
especially in women, and fortify the country’s social welfare safety net.
The deputy labor minister said given the
limited budget and resources, the government’s window for action is limited.
The labor ministry has tried and failed a few
times to call for the state retirement age to be lifted to 62 for men and 57
for women.
“We need to lift the retirement age,” said
Nguyen Huu Dung, a senior advisor to the labor ministry, who is concerned about
how to take advantage of the senior workforce without denying young people
jobs.
Countries in Asia and the Pacific are home to
more than half of the population aged 60 or older in the world, numbering up to
533 million people, said Lubna Baqi, the deputy director for the UNFPA's Asia
and the Pacific Regional Office.
The number of older people in the region is
expected to jump to nearly 1.3 billion by 2050, representing two thirds of the
world’s population aged over 60. Asia's population is ageing faster than
anywhere else in the world, said a study, warning the swelling ranks of the
elderly will cost the region $20 trillion in healthcare by 2030.
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