Evaluations And Policy Suggestions On The Living Quality Of The Aged In China

The advent of worldwide aging population brings great challenges to economic and social development of each country. As a nation with a biggest quantity of the old-aged, China is growing into an aging country at the quickest speed among all the developing countries in the world. The problem of survival and development of millions of the aged shall become a major population challenge against China in 21 century. The quality of living remains to be the focus of aging problem. As an inferior group subjecting to be ignored, there is still a long way to go to enable the aging population in China to get a better quality of living. The current research is grounded on such background.According to characteristics of the aged, this paper defines the connotation and extension of the aging population in China by referring to those general definitions of quality of living.In the empirical research, by factor analysis on the questionnaire about the living quality of the aged population in China, five factors including economic life, mental, physical, family and social interaction are confirmed to be essential to the overall living quality of the aged. The factors of health condition, social life and family circumstance have negative effects to different extents on the living quality of the aged population in China. Then based on the factor variances and factor values, the integrative index of the quality of living of the aged population is proposed in the present paper with an eventual result revealing that the indexes of the quality of living for those aged both in city and countryside are 0.573 and 0.496 respectively. Though the index of city is a little bit higher than that of the countryside, the general standard of living of the aged in China is relatively low with a general existence of dissatisfaction.In consideration of the activity center being a major resort for the aged, the paper attributes one chapter to the economic study of both the investment source and benign utilization of the facilities in the activity center for the aged. A constraint and prompting mechanism is designed by integrating the game theory, supply-demand theory, and cost-revenue theory. A stable funding to the construction of the facilities in the activity center can be assured by marketing operation. And the maintenance of their benign utilization can be achieved by constraint mechanism.Conclusion as well as suggestions for policy-making is proposed at the end of the paper.