Effects Of The Ageing Population

Submitted By sheenarb
Words: 557
Pages: 3

For a country such as the UK, there is an ageing population appearing. This is due to low birth rates and high life expectancy. As time progresses, the population pyramids for the UK predict that birth rates will decrease and life expectancy will increase even more. This will create the ageing population which creates implications such as a higher dependency ratio. This means that a greater amount of money will need to be spent on resources for the elderly such as better healthcare and provision of services related to transport and care of the elderly. These services will only need to increase in the future if the life expectancy continues to increase.

For a country such as Kenya, there is a youthful population and life expectancy is not very high therefore there is a very low percentage of people over the age of 64. However, due the large number of 0-14 year olds, there is still a high dependency ratio as they are reliant on the working population in Kenya. This means that there is also an increased demand for services but they need to be catered more towards education in order to the educate the youthful population so that they can be employable in the future in order to earn a steady income. Also in Kenya, there will be have to be more teaching on different methods of contraception in order to slow down the rapid increase in population due to a very high fertility rate. This means a lot of government funding needs to be used to prevent over-population in the future which is unlike the case of the UK where they are in Stage 5 of the Demographic Transition Model showing that they are in decline and the population will start to decrease. This means that there will need to be more government incentives introduced such as tax incentives or more generous maternity leave in order to increase the birth rate to create the optimum population level where the resources do not exceed population.

As well as this both the UK and Kenya are being affected by migration. In the case of Kenya, there is increased emigration and it is