Lead Story
Issue No. 8 - December/ 2002/january
Ageing with grace
by Professor Richard Blandy
South Australia’s population growth rate is slowing dramatically and its population is ageing rapidly.
According to ABS projections (so-called Series II), by 2023 South Australia’s population will start to decline from a peak of about 1.5 million, not very much greater than it is now, to about 1.4 million in 2051.
The share of the population aged 65 and over will rise from 14.6% now to 31.1% in 2051—more than doubling the absolute number of people in this age group.
Adelaide’s population will reach nearly 1.2 million in 2021 and then fall to 1.1 million in 2051.
This population outlook is shared with most of the rest of Australia, but with different starting dates for the onset of absolute decline among the various States. Tasmania’s population has been in decline since 1995. Victoria’s population will start to decline in 2042; New South Wales’s in soon after 2051. Australia’s population will peak in 2063.
The population outlook is also shared in varying degrees by all other advanced Western countries, plus Japan. The populations of Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom will all be less in 2050 than in 1995. The populations of the remaining Western countries will start to decline in the second half of the present century. The main reason for believing this is that all these countries have fertility rates below the rate at which the population can replace itself.
There are three options for dealing with this situation:
- Increasing fertility
- Increasing migration
- Learning to live better with the situation.
Fertility
The measure of fertility most frequently used for assessing likely future population movements is called the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), which is the number of births a female born today is likely to have, on average, over her life, judging by present age-specific fertility rates. In order for a population to ...
