Well-Being of Older People in East Asia: The People’s Republic of China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea

Hidehiko Ichimura (ichimura@arizona.edu), Xiaoyan Lei (xylei@nsd.pku.edu.cn), Chulhee Lee (chullee@snu.ac.kr), Jinkook Lee (jinkookl@usc.edu), Albert Park (afpark@adb.org) and Yasuyuki Sawada (sawada@e.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
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Hidehiko Ichimura: University of Arizona and University of Tokyo
Xiaoyan Lei: Peking University.
Chulhee Lee: Seoul National University
Jinkook Lee: University of Southern California
Albert Park: Asian Development Bank
Yasuyuki Sawada: University of Tokyo

No 745, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: East Asia is undergoing a rapid demographic transition and “super” aging. As a result of steadily decreasing fertility and increasing life expectancy, older people’s proportion of the population and the old-age dependency ratio is rising across all countries in East Asia, particularly in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Japan, and the Republic of Korea (ROK). In this paper, we empirically investigate the well-being of older people in these three countries, using comparable microlevel data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR), and the Korean Longitudinal Study on Aging (KLoSA). Specifically, we examine the depressive symptom scale as a measure of well-being and estimate the impact of four broad categories—demographic, economic, family-social, and health. The decomposition and simulation analysis reveals that although much of the difference in mean depression rates among countries can be explained by differences in the characteristics of older people in the three countries, there remain significant differences across countries that cannot be explained. In particular, even after accounting for a multitude of factors, older people in the ROK are more likely to be depressed than in the PRC or Japan.

Keywords: aging; well-being; depression; suicide; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 I30 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2024-10-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cna, nep-hap and nep-hea
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