Posted April 1999

Ageing of Rural Populations in South-East and East Asia, Part 2

Advanced ageing: cases from North-East Asia

By the mid-1990s in the Republic of Korea, the proportion of the population in the rural sector that was elderly was virtually one in five compared with only one in ten for the population as a whole. If we consider the current difference between the ageing in rural areas and that for the total population from another point of view, the population as a whole of the Republic of Korea is not projected to reach a proportion of one in five elderly population until around the year 2017. Thus, in terms of ageing, the rural population is some 20 years ahead of the population as a whole. The rapid increase in the proportion of the elderly in the rural sector is recent. In 1975, only 8.5 per cent of the rural population was aged 60 years of age or older; this figure rose to 10 per cent in 1980 and 12.4 per cent in 1985 before reaching 17.9 per cent in 1995 (United Nations 1993, table 1; United Nations 1998).

The Republic of Korea, as one of the "tiger" economies of Asia, is atypical of the region as a whole. Although it experienced a rapid decline in fertility in common with several countries of the region, this was accompanied by a dramatic shift in population from rural to urban areas. In 1960, the Republic of Korea was still primarily rural, with only 28 per cent of its population classified as living in urban areas. By 1975, this proportion had increased to 48 per cent and, within another 20 years, to over 78 per cent. While most of the rapid growth in the cities of Asia could still be attributed to rapid rates of natural increase, in the Republic of Korea well over half of that growth during the years of most rapid urbanization could be attributed to net rural-to-urban migration. For example, 60.5 per cent of urban growth in the Republic of Korea between 1960 and 1970 could be attributed to net migration and reclassification, the highest for all countries in Asia for which data were available except for Japan (United Nations 1980). The comparable figures for the decades of the 1970s and 1980s were 56.3 and 55 per cent respectively (data cited in Skeldon 1998: 9). Young adults were being transferred from the rural to the urban sector of the Republic of Korea faster and in larger numbers than in almost any other country in the Asian region clearly contributing to the rapid ageing of the rural population in that country. The rural population has experienced absolute declines in population since the mid-1960s.

The critical questions revolve around the implications that this population transfer out of the rural population, and the consequent ageing of that population, have had for the rural population as well as for the population as a whole. Did the loss of such a large part of the rural labour force have negative implications for the agricultural economy and society at a time when the Republic of Korea was experiencing a transition from an agrarian to an industrial society? The evidence suggests otherwise. Overall grain production has steadily increased over the last 20 years and, although rice production has fluctuated and has been on a downward path since the early 1990s, it has consistently exceeded demand (table 7). Government policies to ensure self-sufficiency have been an important factor in the persistence of rice production and, since the 1970s, grain prices were raised to improve farm incomes and to stimulate production (Mason et al. 1980: 234). Gross agricultural income increased more than tenfold between 1977 and 1996.

In June 1996, the government introduced a comprehensive plan to maintain the cultivation of rice in an increasingly high labour-cost economy. Part of the package included measures to ensure a specific income level for older farmers nearing retirement. Those farmers 65 years of age and older who wished to retire from farming and who sold their paddy land to households actively engaged in rice cultivation would receive an income subsidy of around $322,500 per hectare of paddy land sold. The only stipulation was that the land sold had to have been under rice cultivation for at least three years prior to the sale (see Korea 1997).

Government figures indicate that the total area of cultivated land (including orchards and hill land) declined by about 12 per cent between 1977 and 1996 with the area under paddy rice declining by 9.7 per cent. The farm population, on the other hand, declined by 57 per cent between 1979 and 1996. The decline in rural population was accompanied by a shift in the structure of landholding. Holdings larger than 3 hectares more than doubled in number, from 32,887 in 1976 to 70,353 in 1996, while those smaller than 0.3 hectares declined from 308,775 to 222,744 over the same period. Non-agricultural income increased as a proportion of average farm household income from about 20 per cent in 1976 to around 30 per cent in 1996. FAO data for the Republic of Korea, using different definitions and sources, suggest a 15 per cent decline in arable land between 1980 and 1996 while, at the same time, food production increased by over 20 per cent (see the data in FAO 1998). The consolidation of holdings allowed greater economies of scale, which resulted in improved production.

Thus, in the Republic of Korea, conditions in the rural sector appear to have improved at the same time as the population has aged. Also, no negative impacts can be seen on the overall situation of food security at the national level. As the country industrialized, the agricultural sector was transformed as holdings became larger and more responsive to the needs of an increasingly urban society. The whole relationship between rural-to-urban migration, ageing of rural populations and changing land tenure requires much further investigation. The Republic of Korea appears to support the case that the exodus of surplus rural population to the cities generates improved standards of living in both rural and urban sectors. Government policy has also been a significant factor in ensuring continued food security in the rural sector throughout the transition in age structure of the rural labour force.

This is not to say, of course, that conditions improved because the rural populations aged but that the improvements occurred despite the ageing. Almost certainly, localized pockets of deprivation came about because of the ageing of rural populations and the exodus of the younger most productive members of those populations. Rural depopulation is part of the transition towards an urban society and outmigration can progress to the extent that a community loses its reproductive capacity and only the elderly are left eventually to die off and leave a landscape of deserted villages and abandoned fields. Such a process tends to occur in more marginal environments where commercial agriculture is not viable as, for example, in the kaso, or severely depopulating districts in Japan - to be considered below - or in the more isolated parts of the New Territories of Hong Kong China.

Incipient ageing: cases from South-East and East Asia

Two additional factors must be borne in mind, however. First, there is more migration from the Central Plains to Bangkok than from the northeast, even though that flow is matched to some extent by a significant counterflow (Thailand 1993). Return migration from Bangkok to the Central Plains may also be of older migrants returning home after finishing their work in the capital city. The age composition of the five-year migration flows into regions of Thailand other than Bangkok, for example, were older than those towards Bangkok (Thailand 1993). In the Central Plains, the impact of migration on the age structure has reinforced the impact of fertility decline, while in the northeast the impact of migration on age structure has been muted by higher fertility. Second, it is likely that, as outlined earlier in this paper, much of the migration out of the north-east in particular is seasonal, or some other form of short- or long-term circulation that is largely unrecorded by large-scale data-recording systems. Thus, the real impact of migration on the age structure of large parts of the rural sector of Thailand may be understated.

A survey in the Mun River basin in the southern part of the north-east found that, in 10 of the 11 provinces covered by the survey, 40 per cent or more of the economically active population in every district were migrant workers (Thailand 1995, annex G). While considerable variation existed among the districts, there was an overall bias towards males among the migrant workers from the region which implied a feminization of agricultural activities as well as an ageing of the labour force. The outmigration allowed some consolidation of landholdings on the better land and abandonment of more marginal holdings. The future rural labour force in the region would be smaller, older and increasingly feminized. Rural development policies hence needed to be adjusted accordingly and the survey envisaged rural depopulation by the year 2020 in several parts of the region covered (Thailand 1995, annex G: 39).

There are several aspects of this process that warrant closer examination. Unfortunately, however, many of the data to make such analyses are just not available. The impact of the return migrants upon the nature of the agricultural economy is a critical element of rural transformation and the capital earned, as well as the experience of the wider world gained by villagers, has been fundamental to the spread of commercial agriculture in parts of the Pacific as well as elsewhere (Connell 1985, Long and Roberts 1984). More speculatively, one could argue that ageing rural labour forces might act as a stimulus for the adoption of labour-saving technologies as heads of household become increasingly unwilling or unable to undertake backbreaking agricultural tasks. Thus, there are several dimensions to the impact of ageing on agricultural production. All, however, will depend upon the potential of the local area for the introduction either of commercial agriculture or of new technologies. Such innovation would not be a realistic proposition in isolated, marginal areas.

Much of the present movement in Thailand is of a short-term or temporary nature and the links between destination and origin areas through regular return visits and remittances are likely to be strong. A national migration survey taken in 1994 reported that over 40 per cent of migrants to Bangkok, for example, had sent money back to their home areas (Thailand 1997). In common with migration elsewhere, population movement from villages to towns initially acts as a support for the household economies in origin areas. See, for example, the debates of the impact of migration on villages in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Chatelain 1976). Those households receiving remittances are generally better off than those that do not. Thailand, with its large independent peasantry with access to land (Pasuk and Baker 1995), and its intense circulation between rural and urban sectors, would be unlikely to have yet experienced any negative impacts as a result of the changing age structure of its population. Dependency ratios calculated separately for the rural sector would be deceptive owing to the importance of younger family members, particularly women, based in towns who are an integral part of the rural household economy. Although fertility decline ultimately tends to favour a trend towards smaller nuclear families, there is the other critical dimension of spatially extended families in which resources in urban as well as rural sectors are incorporated into the peasant household economy. It is only in the later stages, when the migration is increasingly permanent, that depopulation is observed, as we have seen above in the cases of the Republic of Korea and Japan.

Thailand is fortunate to have had sufficient land to allow the extension of an agricultural frontier until fairly recently which has given the peasantry a degree of independence that may not be found in all countries of the region. Movement to escape exploitation by local elites or to search out new resources has been a traditional part of Thai rural life. A detailed discussion of agriculture and the position of the peasantry in Thailand is given in Pasuk and Baker (1995). Unlike the Republic of Korea, the rural population of Thailand is still rising, with the number of agricultural households increasing from 4.7 million in 1983 to 5.1 million in 1992. The area under paddy rice actually decreased over almost the same period from 11.7 million hectares in 1984 to 10.9 million hectares in 1993, while the agricultural GDP grew at between 2.5 and 3.4 per cent per annum through this period. Thus, Thai farmers have shifted to more intensive land-saving technology and to crops that have brought higher income per unit of land (FAO 1996: 4). Where the option of opening up new agricultural land is not available or the adoption of more intensive technologies is not viable, circulation to urban areas becomes an even more important means of ensuring rural food security. I have argued elsewhere that migration, by linking rural and urban economies, acts to alleviate rather than to exacerbate poverty in the rural sector (Skeldon 1997).

One of the dangers, however, is that if and when a downturn affects an economy, as in the current crisis in Asia, the repercussions will very quickly be passed down to the rural sector. Just as the benefits of the incorporation of an additional resource niche in an urban economy support village households, so the loss of that resource may intensify hardship in those same households. For example, families may come to depend upon regular remittances from towns or they may have taken on loans or other commitments that cannot be supported once a family member loses an urban job and has to return to the village.

The case of Thailand is again a useful illustration. Although the share of wealth of the poorest of the poor declined even during the years of rapid growth, the incidence of poverty declined markedly from almost 30 per cent in 1986 to less than 10 per cent in 1994, with the steepest declines in the poorest region, the north-east (Warr 1998: 61-2). That region, as we have seen, has been one of intense human circulation to the major cities and to Bangkok in particular. The rate of economic growth at which poverty levels remain constant has been shown to be at least 6 per cent per annum (Warr 1998: 62); that is, growth rates above that level will tend to reduce the incidence of poverty while those below it will see an increase in poverty. With growth in Thailand forecast to be at least -3.5 per cent in 1998, the implication is that the incidence of poverty may rise to almost 20 per cent by the end of 1998. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of retrenched workers, both male and female, have returned to their villages. The ageing of the age structures of the rural sector will thus be reversed, over the short term at least, as greater numbers of people must survive on a spatially concentrated and more limited resource base. The implications of this process for rural food security are not yet evident, but it is clear that the incidence of poverty will rise.

The option of a return to the village is at least open to a certain number of Thai rural-to-urban migrants. In some other countries where rapid demographic growth has persisted to generate a strain on rural resources, this option may not be so viable. Indonesia may be a case in point here. Circulation between city and village has intensified over the last 20 years (Hugo 1997) but rural population densities in Java and Bali are significantly higher than in Thailand and the sudden reincorporation of large numbers of retrenched workers may indeed create problems of food security. Although rice production in Indonesia has trebled at a time when the population increased by three-quarters, that expansion in rice production "has been achieved through increasing inputs other than labour" (Hugo 1997: 227). Given that ageing is not yet a major concern in rural Indonesia, any reversal of that trend may create more problems for food production than would its continuation. The urban informal sector may have to bear the brunt of absorbing the retrenchments in Indonesia.

China, which has followed a rigid policy to restrict the number of births, has the highest proportion of elderly in both urban and rural sectors of all the countries under consideration, except the highly developed economies of Japan and the Republic of Korea. Some 8.7 per cent of the rural population is 60 years of age or older. China is also recorded as having the highest proportion of elderly urban population of East and South-East Asia after Japan. The relatively small difference between urban and rural sectors, however, should not be taken at face value simply because so much migration towards the cities is not recorded. Ageing in the rural sector is thus likely to be more pronounced than the data suggest while, conversely, the urban populations are likely to be more youthful.

It is accepted that there are somewhere between 70 and 100 million floating migrants in China - or those whose places of actual residence do not match their places of registration - the majority of whom would be young adults. Overall, almost one tenth of China's vast population may be unrecorded migrants, although there will be clear areas of regional concentration. For example, in 1990, the floating population accounted for between 11 and 27.5 per cent of the real populations of eight of China's largest cities (data cited in Ma and Xiang 1998: 546). The nature of their linkages with home communities is, as yet, little understood although it would be surprising if the situation were to be significantly different from that elsewhere in Asia. Millions of workers, laden with the fruits of their labours, return to their home villages every year at Chinese New Year, for example. Thus, again, ageing rural populations are likely to find support in the migration of family members to the urban sector.

Like China, Viet Nam is also facing a recent and rapid increase in the proportion of elderly consequent upon the decline in fertility. Again, like China, much of the increasing domestic migration to the major cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh goes unreported in official sources. A survey of migration to Ho Chi Minh City showed that virtually three-quarters of those who had moved to the city after 1991 had done so without officially changing their registration (Anh et al. 1996). They were, in effect, illegal migrants and were still officially in the rural sector, inflating the more youthful de jure cohorts of that sector while spending most of their time in the town. Yet again, the linkages between town and village are likely to be maintained through circulation, dampening the economic impact of ageing in the rural sector.

Fertility remains relatively high in Viet Nam, as well as in the Philippines. It has hardly begun to decline in Cambodia and the Lao PDR. Throughout much of South-East Asia, the ageing of the population structures remains a problem of the future which, in terms of food security, pales into insignificance when compared with the current economic and political issues facing the region. The incidence of human circulation throughout the region, whereby the youthful cohorts shift back and forth between town and village, will act to ameliorate the immediate effects of the increasing numbers of elderly in the rural sector. Over the longer term however, and particularly in more marginal environments, the ageing of rural communities does indeed imply significant social and economic problems that require policy intervention. Here, we must return to the most developed economies of North-East Asia, and particularly to that of Japan.

Severely depopulating rural areas: the case of Japan ^[4]

A critical point in the evolution of the kaso areas came in 1987 when the annual number of deaths began to exceed the number of births. The natural increase of the kaso areas has gone from -1,409 in that year to -34,939 in 1996. The process had reached a stage where the kaso areas had lost their reproductive capacity through the continuous exodus of younger cohorts and they had entered into the last phases of depopulation. By the mid-1990s, too, the volume of population migration had slowed as the populations declined. In 1980, with a total kaso population of 9.21 million, there had been an in-migration to these areas of 404,441 and an out-migration of 507,346, for a net balance of -102,905. By 1995, with a population of 7.97 million, the annual inflow had been reduced to 272,297 and the outflow to 319,308, for a net balance of -47,011. Thus, there had been a much more rapid decline in population movements than for the population as a whole. The kaso populations have become increasingly residual, gradually atrophying through mortality.

Clearly, in a developed and wealthy society such as Japan, national and regional food security are not being threatened by the depopulation of rural areas and small towns, even if these areas do cover half of the land area. The concerns are more over the costs of supplying adequate social infrastructure, clinics, hospices, and so on, to isolated areas which have limited revenue-generating potential. Kaso areas are primarily in mountainous or other marginal areas and depopulation, as in many parts of Europe, is a logical spatial adjustment of the population to an economy based on industry and, increasingly, services which are located in accessible, highly urbanized areas.

Certainly, overall food production indices in Japan, according to FAO (1998) estimates, have remained fairly constant or declined marginally over the last decade, while the arable area declined by 8 per cent between 1980 and 1996. The area under permanent crops declined more markedly by one third over the same period. However, these changes are more logical macroeconomic adjustments in a high labour-cost economy as it is brought more fully into a global system than any simple response to declining productive capacity of the rural labour force. That said, however, agricultural incomes are clearly lower in kaso areas than in other agricultural areas and these differences have increased over time. In 1995, agricultural income of kaso areas was just over 70 per cent of the national average. These kaso areas are pockets of relative deprivation in a prosperous country but are neither sunk in rural poverty, owing to their ageing populations, nor significant positive or negative contributors to national development trends.

Discussion

The sectoral shift in the structure of ageing is not available in the United Nations projections; nor would it be particularly meaningful given the complex mix of the three factors in urbanization: natural increase, net migration and reclassification. The latter two are virtually impossible to project accurately. However, from the experience of countries undergoing the process as described in the cases in this paper, we can see that ageing will increasingly be a rural issue. It is there that ageing as a social problem will be most intense as younger family members move to the cities leaving the elderly to look after themselves. This is not to say that the elderly in urban areas do not face problems of isolation and loneliness too, but the costs of providing basic support services for the elderly are likely to be greater and more difficult to implement in rural areas. In Japan in 1990, some 463,203 men and 1,702,163 women aged 60 years or over lived alone, 10 per cent of the total number of Japanese in that age group. Unfortunately, the rural-urban breakdown is not available. Information from kaso areas for 1997, however, revealed that the proportion of household heads of 65 years of age and over who lived alone was, at 9.6 per cent, just over double the proportion for non-kaso areas.

The decline in fertility throughout the Asian region means that there are fewer children available per person to look after the population when they become old. Urbanization and the transition to industrial societies might be seen to weaken family ties, spatially if not emotionally, and residual rural populations without adequate welfare systems are likely to suffer relative if not absolute deprivation. Studies on the living arrangements of the elderly in South-East Asian countries have shown that, despite the rapidity of economic and social change that has occurred over the last decades, the familial system of care for the elderly has been maintained. See the essays in Knodel and Debavalya (1997). Very few of the elderly live on their own or without seeing their children on a regular basis. Only 4.5 per cent of the elderly in rural Thailand (and 3.5 per cent in urban areas) in 1990 lived on their own, for example.

Change can certainly be expected in the future as fertility change and migration impact further upon the family. While most Asian societies are unlikely to develop welfare systems as comprehensive as those found in Europe, for example, they may choose to rely on the promotion of "community care" approaches. There is still time to plan for the type of future care to be provided for the elderly in the region. Even in the year 2020, the proportion of elderly in the countries under consideration will rarely be above one in six of the population. However, as we have seen in the cases of Japan and the Republic of Korea, the ageing of the rural population can be many years ahead of that for the population as a whole. If the linkages between urban and rural sectors are to weaken as rural migrants spend longer at their destinations, the time for action may be shorter than might be suggested by the figures for ageing for the populations as a whole.

While the ageing of the rural populations can be related to the spatial spread of fertility decline, migration is the key factor in intensifying regional and sectoral patterns of ageing. The exodus of the younger cohorts, and the return of older migrants upon retirement, accelerates ageing in the villages. Return migration, through the introduction of more modern ideas into the communities, may help to diffuse the idea of a small family norm and the contraceptive practices that foster the decline in fertility and, ultimately, promote the ageing of the local population. Initially, however, migration acts to support the rural populations by extending the resource base of peasant households to include other opportunities, and primarily those in the cities. Thus, although a village population sensu stricto may be ageing, to consider that population as an isolate is deceptive as it is but part of a much wider economic system that transcends the rural sector itself.

This logic can be extended to the rural sector as a whole. Nevertheless, over the longer term, migration can act to undermine the village communities as the number of outmigrants increases and they spend progressively longer at their destinations. As the reproductive capability of a community is eroded, depopulation is the end result, as we saw in the cases of the kaso areas in Japan. For most countries in East and South-East Asia, such a scenario is unlikely to evolve in the near term except in the Republic of Korea and perhaps in parts of China. Rural depopulation, nevertheless, cannot be simply dismissed as an unlikely development outcome by other countries in the region. Labour shortages are already prevalent in the rural sectors of Malaysia and Thailand and these are presently being met by migration from neighbouring countries, much of which is illegal. The transformations that are being wrought by rural-to-urban migration and by fertility decline far transcend those of demographic structure and raise questions about the integrity of the nation states themselves. Situations in which at least one in five of the labour force is a foreign worker, as in the case of Malaysia, must ultimately bring about change in the nature of the society.

It is clear from the data presented that no macrolevel, or even regional, economic difficulties appear to be the result of the ageing of the rural populations. Agricultural production overall increased as more economically rational holdings could be created and more marginal lands were taken out of production as greater numbers left for the cities. The ageing and ultimate decline of the rural populations tends to be associated with increasing wealth at the national level. Ageing, as primarily the result of fertility decline, is a direct consequence of the developments that brought about that decline, both in terms of policy intervention and in the complex matrix of economic and social development variables. The ageing of human populations obviously was not a direct policy goal of governments but an outcome of other government policies as well as of global economic and political forces. Governments in the region now need to accommodate to the ageing consequences of those processes even if no negative impacts can yet be observed at the macrolevel. There are clear local difficulties as marginal areas embark on the process of depopulation engendered through outmigration. Thus, as wealth accumulates at that national level, it is incumbent upon the state to ensure that ageing populations in isolated rural areas are adequately provided with services and care. There may be much to learn for countries in the region from the policies followed by Japan towards its kaso areas. The provision of basic medical services in kaso areas over the recent past, for example, has outpaced that for the population as a whole.

Conclusion

Thus, the principal issues of ageing in the region under consideration are likely to revolve around the social conditions of the elderly in isolated rural areas. How are poor states in the region going to provide these areas with services and care, particularly in a context of declining family concerns where close family members are permanently absent? Once remittances sent back home by family members in towns begin to decline as the urban commitment of the migrants grows, difficult questions will be posed for the state, as well as for the elderly back in the rural sector. Even in Japan, many elderly must move to the towns where at least they can have family support. Such an alternative may not be open to the elderly in less affluent societies, especially where a transnational movement might be involved.

While most previous work has focused on the overall trends of the ageing of Asian populations, this paper has emphasized the importance of adopting a sectoral perspective. The ageing of the rural sector is likely to anticipate by several years the kinds of consequences that are implied by the data for the populations as a whole. This paper has also identified unknowns and unresolved issues, many of which are due to data unavailability. The issue of ageing, depopulation and land tenure, for example, remains poorly understood, as does the issue of the gender implications of ageing in the rural sector. Policy issues, too, require much more detailed examination, particularly with respect to the funding of services for the aged in more isolated rural areas which have limited local potential and have become cut off from family support systems through remittances. Marginal areas are unlikely to be high in a country's priority for social development but it is incumbent for modern nations and states to ensure that the elderly do not become marginal peoples, in isolated regions and elsewhere.

Notes

2. Singapore and the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong China are not further considered in this paper because their rural populations are either non-existent or negligible.

3. Unfortunately, the electronic compilation of this paper did not permit ready reproduction of the relevant maps. The map of the distribution of the elderly can be found in NSO (1994) and those of decline in fertility in ESCAP (1988).

4. The information in this section comes largely from Japan (1998).

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