Elder poverty in an ageing world: Conditions of social vulnerability and low income for women in rich and middle-income nations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social vulnerability for older persons, especially older women, due to insufficient income in retirement and earlier in life and low market earnings may be attributable to many sources, both demographic and economic, in our globalizing world. This paper examines the problems of population ageing, low incomes, and social spending on the elderly in comparative perspective, with a focus on older women in several rich and middle-income nations. We examine the United States, Canada, and a set of European nations using the LIS (Luxembourg Income Study) database, and three middle-income nations, focusing on Taiwan, China, and Mexico, around the turn of the century. In particular, we address what happens to older women as they outlive their husbands and have fewer claims on pensions and retirement wealth and maintain fewer productive capacities in the paid labor force. Issues that arise include the implications of policies relating to taxation, social spending, and transfers, as well as - of course - gender differentials in labor force participation, lifetime savings, and pre- and post-retirement incomes. Many older women, especially those in middle-income countries, also often share living arrangements with their adult children. We assess the net effects of existing policies on poverty and low income and wealth. While best practices may be identified, each nation must create its own set of mutually supportive policies that provide protection against global economic forces while at the same time encouraging self-reliance and efficient behavior, especially in the savings market. We conclude that policy can make a difference in outcomes, as shown for instance by the low cost but highly target effective Canadian efforts in fighting elder poverty, and by the Australian superannuation retirement income system. However, the developing economies of Mexico, China, and even Taiwan evolve from a tradition that does not yet support Western-style social insurance programs. In these nations, intergenerational co-residence is liable to be the key feature of antipoverty policy for elders in the coming decades.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".