Making Ageing a Global Agenda: India,China and Beyond

Abstract

Demographic debates in the decades following the 1960s have shaped much of the discourse on population ageing across the world. This paper traces these discourses and research agendas that led to the understanding of demographic transitions in the developed and developing world. The policies were mostly articulated by demographers from the US and ageing was seen more as a challenge for the West. The questions addressed in this paper are that apart from the predictable and unchanging vulnerabilities of ageing voiced earlier by anthropologists and social workers in the 1940–1950s, what were the new risks being articulated by development experts? Once a diffused ‘world’ agenda was articulated and largely left adrift without resources, what were its afterlives? How did experts in various parts of the world redeploy the global ageing agenda and plan to assert various other alignments? Where did China and India figure in this? The paper locates the debates on India and China in the afterlives of the World Assembly on Ageing held in Vienna in 1982.

Keywords

China India ageing demographic transition World Assembly on Ageing

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