Southeast Asia is aging – and rather quickly. In Vietnam, the number of 0-14 year-olds will decrease by 3.7 million between now and 2050. In Thailand, it will fall from 10.7 million to 7.8 million. In Indonesia, from 69.9 million to 61.6 million. In Myanmar, from 13.2 million to 11.5 million. In real terms, the number of younger people will only grow in the Philippines (from 34.7 million to 36.4 million), although as a percentage of the population, it will fall from around 30 to 23 percent. See the chart below for the percentage of the population that will be aged 0-14 at different points in time.
In some ways, this is good news. Fewer children could mean that governments spend more money per student – so long as governments don’t decrease their expenditure on education. But it’s not just that Southeast Asia’s youngsters are thinning in number; the numbers of elderly are set to spike, as I noted in a recent column.
Compare two age groups. In Singapore, the percentage of over-60s in society overtook the percentage of under-14s around 2010. Thailand got there around 2015. Vietnam will get there in 2035. Malaysia will do it so 2040, Indonesia around 2045, Myanmar by 2050. The rest will experience this sometime in the second half of this century. The Philippines will be the last.
Sooner or later, all Southeast Asian states are set to face the same question: spend more money on the (fewer) children or on the (growing) elderly? The choice won’t be easy. Just 40 percent of Vietnamese aged over 60 are covered by social protection systems – and that’s a high percentage by regional standards. The figure stands at around 6 percent in Laos and 14 percent in Myanmar. Thailand leads the way at almost 90 percent.
The implication of this is that states will have to develop their pensions and retirement schemes quickly. Vastly more government money will have to be spent on healthcare – both because the number of old people relying on healthcare services will increase, and because Southeast Asian’s over-65s are becoming less reliant on their families. In Thailand, for instance, some 6.4 percent of elderly people lived alone in 2000; now it’s more than 12.5 percent. In the late 1990s, almost two-thirds of older people lived with their extended families; now it’s just half. That’s a trend happening regionwide.
According to the World Bank, the Vietnamese government should be spending something around 8-9 percent of GDP on public pensions by 2035, to cater to its age demographics, not the 2-3 percent it currently is.
One study on China from 2022 found that population aging has a significant negative impact on local public education financial expenditure: every 1 percent increase in old-age dependency ratio sees local public education financial expenditure decrease by 0.3 percent. A major study of 87 countries from 1996 to 2017 found that “an increase in the old-age population is positively correlated to a higher government spending in health, environment, and social protection categories, while it reduces the spending, particularly on education and housing using the full sample.”
That wasn’t entirely surprising. But what seemed to astonish the researchers was that an old-age population in developing countries “pushes the public spending on defense, which remains a puzzle…” The researchers added: “The idea of nationalism and policies preference for defense become critical for aging voters, which is reflected in a rise in the spending on defense in developing countries once the countries become more aged… [on] the relationship between age and political ideas… as people become older, the political idea tends to move towards Social Dominance Orientation [a personality trait measuring an individual’s support for social hierarchy] and Right-wing authoritarianism.” In other words, older people are more supportive of the status quo. A Pew Research Center survey from last year found that, in Japan and South Korea, older adults are more supportive of authoritarian systems than younger ones.
Complicating the picture, however, a study of 93 countries across the world between 1994 and 2014 found that “support for democracy increases with age, but declines with a greater proximity to death. Thus, individuals who anticipate a longer expected life span are more inclined to support democracy.” In 2020, following waves of youthful anti-military protests, the academic Kevin S.Y. Tan looked at demographics and democracy in Thailand, Southeast Asia’s fastest aging country (after Singapore). “The rapid aging of Thailand may provide, at least, a complementary, partial explanation for not only the ongoing political turmoil but also preceding incidents that have increasingly polarized Thai politics since a military coup toppled the democratically elected Thaksin Shinawatra administration in 2006,” he wrote, noting that the protests of 2019 and 2020 “consist of greater numbers of younger adults and youths than earlier protest movements.”
It’s not the under-15s who are protesting. But it seems intuitive that having fewer children frees up time for childless young adults to engage in political action. Indeed, fewer children mean fewer responsibilities for young adults. That could make them less inhibited from taking risks, such as engaging in political protests despite the risk of imprisonment. It’s more difficult to justify possible jail time and no salary for years when you have a child. The swelling aging ranks of the population could demand more money be spent on healthcare as well as on defense, policing, and nationalist posturing.
However, with a bulging number of young adults who, on average, will have no or fewer dependents (children) and are increasingly less relied upon to care for their retired parents, it could also mean that there are more chances of political agitation. And, clearly, as Southeast Asia ages (the region as a whole will be “aged” by 2042), governments will face new and difficult decisions over which groups receive more funds. That’s likely to spark resentment from some quarters.
I haven’t seen a study on it, but it would be interesting to see what impact fewer marriages in society (a trend in some Southeast Asian states) have on political engagement. One might expect singles to be even less inhibited about the risks involved in political action. Proving a causation between demographics and any particular outcome is difficult. But it’s food for thought.