Ageing in Asia and the Pacific : critical issues in national policies and programmes

This chapter outlines the critical issues that form the context for population ageing in Asia and the Pacific. It reviews a range of published materials and highlights certain critical issues currently evident, or likely to emerge over the coming decades, that will be relevant for the future development of national policies on ageing (NPA) in the region. The field of policy research is maturing, and gerontology is establishing itself in many of the countries of the region, supplementing the work of social researchers, clinicians and biomedical scientists involved with older persons. The decade of the 1990s was a crucial period for research, and marks the evolution of public policy in ageing in the Asian and Pacific region. The early years of the twenty-first century have promised to be yet more important.