Well beyond the 60s? The impact of a pandemic on the growth of the older population

Abstract

Contrary to expectations that the first decades of the 21st century would experience an increase in lived time, the 2020s cast doubts on the future of old age. The Brazilian population is expected to increase until 2030, when it will reach its maximum, with a total of approximately 215 million inhabitants. A trend of population decline was already in progress and had already been documented, but the pandemic accelerated this process. This study describes a set of projections for the older Brazilian population. The projections were elaborated using the main components method, whose advantages are the possibility of separately projecting the behavior of the three demographic variables (fertility, mortality, and migrations) and obtaining results disaggregated by sex and age groups. Birth data for 2018, 2019, and 2020 suggest a 3.51 and 5.28% decrease in total births between 2018 and 2019 and 2019 and 2020, respectively. Preliminary data for 2021, which indicate the continuation of this trend between 2020–2021, show a 2.32% reduction in the number of births. The hypotheses raised for the mortality patterns, if proven to be accurate, suggest a life expectancy of 72.8 years for men and 76.2 years for women at the final period of the projection, resulting in gains of 4.6 and 2.0 years, respectively. Despite these gains, the levels obtained in 2019, pre-pandemic, would be reached by the male population only between 2035 and 2040.