These data from the INE have been reflected in the report ‘A profile of the old people in Spain (2023): basic statistical indicators’. Thanks to a series of demographic, health, economic and social variables, the work analyzes the changes that old age has experienced, increasingly widespread in the country and increasingly judged by certain sectors, who consider that an older population is synonymous with a negative impact and costs associated with social and health services.

“I’m sorry to say it so crudely, but it’s increasingly clear that many people, even if they don’t say it openly, are convinced that old people are a pest. They think they are very harmful to the economy, to the National Health System or to care. But that is not true and even less so for the new old age,” he assured. Julio Pérez Díazdemographer at the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography (IEGD-CSIC) and coordinator of this work.

One of the sectors that thinks the negative side is the Bank of Spain itself. In their study The impact of population aging on the evolution of the activity rate in Spain, they stated that the activity rate of the Spanish economy had been reduced by 3.4 percentage points between 2012 and 2022 due to the impact of the aging of its population. . A cut that, according to this work, would have been even greater (4.2 points) if almost a million immigrants had not joined during these years.

The value of pensions

“I I go around the world saying that the aging population has improved the economy“, Pérez Díaz responded. An example: the “dizzying growth of large 2.0 companies”, such as Silicon Valley. “The main financing that these industries had were pension plan funds, which at that time were the result of very full generations that had worked all their lives and had accumulated large capitals. Few funds could do the same. The technological revolution arose largely thanks to the financial capabilities of that population“, he defended.

In May of this year, Social Security counted 10.02 million pensions, with retirement pensions (6.34 million) being the most frequent, followed by widowhood pensions. The average retirement pension is 1,375 euros, although there are regional disparities. At young generations who criticize how expensive it will be to pay for them, has reminded them that “they are deferred salaries“, and has reproached those who only think “in terms of sustainability in the Social Security fund, as if everything generated by the elderly were not benefits for the generations that came after.”

Because, as he has highlighted, if there are now younger generations who have been able to emancipate themselves later to study or be better qualified to perform jobs and, therefore, progress professionally and economically, it has been because they had the support of a generation who is now retired.

The demographer has also recalled how During the economic crisis some elderly people left the residence in which they were staying to help their children get through a bad time. Or how many people over 65 now act as caregivers for their own parents with neurocognitive problems, or are the ones who go to pick up their grandchildren at the school gate every day. “That they do, and can do, all this is synonymous with health,” she assured. Because there are more people with chronic diseases, but that means they don’t die. The population ‘gets older’ with a better state of health and mobility and, also, with better financial situations and cultural life.

Change in the population pyramid

Health improvements also mean that, although many fewer children are born, a very high percentage of them survive. “In the 60s, Spain experienced a baby boombut it not only consisted of more children being born, it is that for the first time infant mortality began to be quite low“, he indicated. Now, people who were born in that decade are approaching 65 years of age, which will cause an anomaly in the population pyramid, which could become “a mushroom.”

“The great news is that the vast majority of those born will live to old age. This has never happened in human history,” said Pérez Díaz. Once these full generations become extinct, the CSIC predicts that the population pyramid will look more and more like a column. But no baby boomer Don’t worry: the prediction is that at least half of them will survive to be 90 years old.

Aging by communities and gender

Another of the data left by the work presented by the CSIC is the distribution of the elderly population. For example, Asturias, Castilla y León, Galicia, the Basque Country, Cantabria, Aragón, La Rioja and Extremadura are the autonomous communities with the highest average age in Spain. All of them have more than 20% of elderly people, while the Balearic Islands and Murcia are the communities with the lowest proportions, with 16%.

In addition, of those 9,479,010 older people who were registered in Spain on January 1, 2022, women are the majority, surpassing men by 30.5%. Likewise, if the percentage of time lived in good health from the age of 65 is measured, the contrast between men and women in Spain is clear: for men, 55.7% of the time remaining to live (10.7 years) is in good condition, while is reduced to 43.8% (10.3 years) in the case of women.

Projections suggest that by 2040, if everything continues as before, the population in Spain, which would reach 52 million inhabitants, 4.5 million more than today.