Universal social protection for healthy ageing

The world’s population is ageing at a time when an increasing number of countries are going through a demographic transition. Thus, fertility rates are decreasing while in many countries mortality rates are declining or stagnating (Wang et al. 2020). In 2019, half of the world’s countries and territories had belowreplacement fertility, meaning that the policy challenges associated with ageing populations are now becoming extremely acute for many countries. This phenomenon is emerging more rapidly in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income countries. Thus, two out of three older persons today live in low- and middle-income countries and it is projected that by 2050 this proportion will increase to four out of five older persons (UN 2019). These changes are occurring in a context of economic and institutional development that tends to be less favourable than in the era when high-income countries were at the beginning of their demographic transition