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

Section 3: Demographic, Social and Economic Profile
in recent years, the gender gap reversed and now girls
attain more formal schooling than boys in Thailand
(Knodel 1997).
Considerable attention has been devoted to the
potential impact on the well-being of the future
elderly from social and economic change associated
with development in Thailand and the developing
world generally (Kanchanachitra et al. 2007). Less
widely recognized is that, through the process of
cohort succession, the elderly of the future who will
experience these impacts will differ considerably in
their characteristics from the elderly of today.
Cohort succession refers to the replacement of
persons making up any particular age group in a given
year by persons currently younger than them as time
passes. Successive cohorts differ from each other not
only in numerical size, but also in their socioeconomic
and demographic composition. Thus the
characteristics of age groups change as time passes.
Since education is largely “fixed” at an earlier stages
of life, projecting the changing educational
composition of persons who will be in the elderly age
range in the future based on information for the
current adult population below the elderly ages is a
relatively straightforward exercise.
Anticipating changes in the educational levels of the
older population is useful for a number of reasons.
Education influences employment opportunities and
thus financial status later in life. Literacy provides
much greater access to information. Better education
enables older persons to deal more effectively with
government agencies and health services. Moreover,
as recent analyses have shown, higher levels of
education are associated with better health status
in Thailand as elsewhere (Zimmer and Amornsirisomboon
2001).
A recent study has projected the educational
distribution for the population age 65 and over for a
number of developing countries including Thailand
using census data from 2000 (Hermalin, Ofstedal &
Tesfai 2007). Table 3.3 shows educational
characteristics of Thais age 65 and over by gender as
projected from 2000 through 2045. Two indicators
are provided. The first shows the per cent who have
no more than primary education including those
lacking any formal education. The second shows the
per cent who have at least some upper secondary or
higher education. In general, men have more
education than women. This is reflected by the fact
that, through the entire period covered by the
projection, higher percentages of older women are
characterized by no more than a primary education
and a lower percentage by upper secondary or higher
education. Overall, the educational profile of the older
population in Thailand will improve considerably by
2045. Still, for the next few decades, a large majority
of both older men and women will have had at most
only a primary level education and just a small
minority will have attained upper secondary or higher
level education. By 2030, however, the educational
composition of the population 65 and older starts to
show significant improvements reflecting the major
expansion of secondary education in Thailand that
began around 1990 (Knodel 1997).
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