Quantity and Quality of the Aged Population in Japan : The Use of Life Tables for the Assessment of Group Vitality

Abstract

Due to the gradual increase of the levels of living and the development of health and welfare services, the mankind succeeded in decreasing death rates for all age-groups, resulting in the prolongation of life-span as a whole. On the other hand, however, the quantitative accumulation of elderly population is causing a serious anxiety among some groups of people to meet a more difficult situation to solve various problems concerning the cares for the aged. The speaker is not so pessimistic, but expects the qualitative improvement of productive activities of elderly population, along with the prolongation of life. Though the speaker has not yet sufficient data to confirm the improvement of physical and mental activities of the aged population in Japan, he assumed, to make up for the lack of above data, some life table functions, such as the reduction of remaining life-expectancy at age x(e^^○_x), the increase of mortality rate at age x(_1q_x), etc as qualitative indicators of surviving or productive ability for the aged. In Japan before the World War II, people between 15 and 60 years were usually regarded as productive age population. And the life-expectancy for the male at age 60 was 12.6 years in the 6th life tables (compiled for 1935-36). The nearest values of x, corresponding to x(e^^○_x)=12.6 in other life tables, increased clearly in post-war years, as shown in Table 4A-column d. The same phenomenon of prolongation of productive age period is also recognized on the values of _1q_x (Table 4A-e), as well as for the female (Table 4A-g & h). If the borderline age dividing productive and non-productive old-age populations will move toward higher age in the future (Table 5-d), the proportion of non-productive old-age people in percentage of the total (Table 5-e) as well as of the productive population (Table 5-f) will remarkably decrease as compared with the case when the old-age borderline is fixed at the same age, at 65 years for instance (Table 5-b & c). Not to be afraid of enormous quantitative increase of non-productive aged population, the speaker would rather advise to try to find ways to allocate the expanded labour force found among the elderly people for providing more necessary means and services for all the needy people, on a major premise that the total world population should be suppressed within an adequate limit.