Education, elderly health, and differential population aging in South Korea: A demographic approach

BACKGROUND Population aging proceeds with other socioeconomic developments, including educational expansion. Improvements in educational attainment lead to changes in demographic behaviors such as assortative mating, fertility, and the intergenerational transmission of education, which change the health of the elderly and the education of their offspring generation. OBJECTIVE We examine such a jointly-changing process in South Korea. METHODS We apply a recursive demographic model (Mare and Maralani 2006) by using the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (KLoSA). RESULTS First, improvements in education lead to improvements in health among the elderly. Intermediate demographic factors make positive contributions to this improvement. Second, improvements in education lead to a decline in the ratios of offspring to the elderly because better-educated people have fewer children. However, this decrease is not substantial. Third, improvements in education increase the ratio of college-educated offspring to the unhealthy elderly because of improvements in both offspring‘s education and elderly health. 1 Kookmin University, South Korea. E-Mail: [email protected]. 2 University of California, Los Angeles, U.S.A. 3 Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, Mexico. 4 Spectron Desarrollo S.C., Mexico. Kye et al.: Education, elderly health, and differential population aging in South Korea 754 http://www.demographic-research.org CONCLUSION The results suggest that improvements in education change configurations of the elderly and their offspring‘s generations, mitigating the negative consequences of population aging, such as increasing burdens of elderly support.