This special issue of The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, edited by Anita Mukherjee and APARC's Asia Health Policy Program Director Karen Eggleston, focuses on a key challenge around the world: financing the many needs that come with longer lives, lower fertility, and older population age structures. The triumph of longevity can pose a challenge to the fiscal integrity of public and private pension systems and other social support programs disproportionately used by older adults. This challenge is a formidable but ultimately happy one, as people around the world today can expect to live longer and healthier lives.

The countries and regions studied in this special issue include many that are leading the world in this longevity transition with relatively old population age structures, especially in Europe and Japan. Other areas such as Latin American countries and especially China are rapidly catching up, or have large total populations of older adults at relatively low per capita income and little formal social security, such as India.