Population Ageing and the Well-Being of Older Persons in Thailand ...

Section 2: The Demography of Ageing
Thailand. In the year 2000, women constituted 55
per cent of the total Thai population age 60 and over.
This is projected to increase during the next half
century reaching 59 per cent by 2050. The excess of
older women over older men is more pronounced
among the older groups within the older age span.
Thus in the year 2000, women are estimated to
constitute almost two-thirds of the population aged
80 and over and this is anticipated to increase
substantially to over 71 per cent by the year 2050.
Given that older women tend to have more health
problems than men as discussed in Section 4 of this
report, the increasing feminization of the oldest old
as projected by the UN will add to the challenge of
providing adequate health care posed by the increasing
numbers of persons in the oldest age group.
Although more males are born than females, the
almost universal advantage women have over men with
respect to mortality results in more women than men
surviving to older ages and thus older populations are
typically disproportionately female. Moreover, since
the female mortality advantage continues through
older ages, the predominance of women tends to
increase with age within the older age span. This
predominance of women among older persons is
sometimes referred to as the “feminization of the
elderly”. Table 2.2 also provides an overview of the
per cent of women within the older population of
Although the majority of the older population are
women, it is important to keep in mind that still a
substantial share are men. This tends to be overlooked
in numerous discussions of population ageing which
typically emphasize the feminization of the elderly and
as a result focus only women when considering
gender specific needs of older persons (Knodel &
Ofstedal 2003). Thus while the number of older
women in Thailand will grow faster than the number
of older men, the projections still anticipate that the
absolute number of older men will increase quite
substantially as well. For example, between 2000 and
2050, the number of men aged 60 and over is
projected to increase by 5.5 million. This is a very
substantial number even if smaller than the 8.4
million increase projected for women age 60 and over.
Even among the population 80 and over, the number
of men is projected to increase by over a million.
2.4 Age structure changes
Thailand is well along in what is often referred to as
the demographic transition, i.e. the shift from high to
low levels of fertility and mortality. These changes in
fertility and mortality affect not only the share of the
population in older age groups but the entire age
structure. Both the magnitude of changes and the
speed with which they occur are likely to have
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