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Will the government be able to overcome protectionist barriers to successfully attract skill and talent from abroad, including the children of earlier Hong Kong emigrants? Time will tell. The real battle is not overseas, but at home. If the government fails again, then we know Japan’s lost two decades will be our future.

The widespread perception of a spectacular rise in poverty rates in the past decade or so is not substantiated. The evidence shows that the economically active household poverty rate has risen modestly, not phenomenally, since 1985. The government’s recurrent cash transfer has done a reasonable job in keeping the poverty rate within bounds. It might have inadvertently provided incentives for more people to drop out of the labor force and thereby created some of the poverty that society is trying to alleviate.

Privatizing the public rental housing estates would create a very large client pool of elderly homeowners willing to take advantage of mortgage-backed annuity schemes in the era of modern finance. This would create better opportunities for diversifying risks associated with the uncertainty of life expectancy. A bigger market could lead to better terms to the benefit of all participants. And, if the elderly poor in our public housing estates became homeowners, perhaps their children would pay them more attention. In principle, recurrent government funding is not required because it would be financed by land that currently has no market value because public rental housing units are nontraded assets. Selling public rental housing units to sitting tenants would restore the market value of a non- traded asset that could provide old age support for elderly people.

In the 2012 contest for chief executive, the two candidates, Leung Chun Ying and Henry Tang, both put forth proposals for old age social security support. In this chapter, the author estimates the long-term cost of the proposals made by Leung and Tang and compares them with the long-term cost of the current welfare payments for the elderly. Their proposals are also compared with the one put forward by Professor Chow Wing-sun. Among the three proposals, conspicuously Leung's is the most affordable one. It is important to separate the issues of poverty and financing old age support. This chapter discusses three critical factors which led to the formation of government-funded old age social security schemes in the West, and states that the public must think twice about allowing our politicians to follow the footsteps of British politicians in the past.

Tunisia, a middle-income country in the Arab Maghreb region north of the African continent, has one of the highest percentages of elderly persons aged 65 and above among Arab countries. Similar to other countries in North Africa, family is the cornerstone for the support of older people, however, family cohesion and care can not be the safety net that older people can always rely on. In the face of new demographic, social, political and economic realities, especially in the wake of the Tunisian revolution, the Tunisian government is called to make the most of existing systems of cultural and social resources to create a public safety net for older persons across Tunisia. This chapter explores socioeconomic realities of older persons in Tunisia, their demographics, health and geriatrics care as well as the existing governmental institutional arrangements for the care and support of older people.

Public discussions of old age retirement support have always been very confusing because they involve two different concerns: alleviating poverty, and getting votes (or building political support). It is obvious that some advocates are concerned with the plight of the elderly poor. Poverty among the elderly population is particularly devastating because they have ceased to work and, if they have no savings, they must rely on others to support them. Not everyone can ask their children for help. Hong Kong has numerous social transfer schemes to support the elderly poor without means. One can query whether these schemes are adequate, and if not, how they can be enhanced. One can also ask how an enhanced scheme could be financed. But a universal scheme, such as that demanded by politicians and social advocates, is not a necessity for helping the elderly poor.

Using household income to measure income inequality and define poverty has many flaws. Comparing individuals and households of the same age cohort is far more likely to be meaningful, because it is comparing households with their peers who are at the same stage of their life cycle, have grown up in the same era, and have the same vintage of schooling. Age is the better choice for anchoring the poverty line, not household size.

Daniel Callahan addresses special concerns at the opposite end of the spectrum. He invites the reader into a discussion of grief and of Alzheimer’s dementia, of the moral problems facing individual caretakers, and of the broader question of intergenerational responsibility of children to care for their parents. Callahan makes use of personal narrative to provide practical guidelines for the use of life-sustaining treatment for advanced dementia. His conclusions, like so many in this volume, are limited and cautiously optimistic, and he underscores themes articulated in chapter 7 by Ridenour and Cahill pertaining to the role of community in continuing to meet the needs of the dying.

This chapter compares the response of 25 countries in terms of available measures to their first-wave response to COVID-19, measured in terms of reported COVID cases and COVID mortality. It finds that the most important factor, in putting in place an initial response to COVID, was having a high number of COVID tests per reported case.

The spinster is one of the most pathologized characterisations of female ageing in cultural texts, continuing to be a source of social unease for much of the twentieth century. This chapter establishes the broader social and historical contexts underlying such representations, before considering how representations of the spinster evolved in British films of the post-war era. The problematic status of the spinster was implicit in the predominant polarised representations of the type as either a comic device or a warning of the perils of single life. The chapter starts by exploring how unease about the middle-aged spinster was articulated in British films of the 1930s, whereas the elderly spinster could be a heroic martyr as in The Lady Vanishes (1938).

In recent decades socio-demographical changes have put under increasing pressure that part of the welfare state that deals with care policies, in particular child and elderly care. Italy has been traditionally characterized by a strong familistic approach which has been a great barrier to the expansion of care policies. This chapter describes and interprets what has happened and why Italy has so far missed the occasion to strengthen its public social care, while other countries from Continental and Southern Europe have tried to do so. Nevertheless if, on the one hand, “a frozen landscape” is what best describes the limited policy innovation promoted by the central State, on the other the last two decades have witnessed significant processes of “innovation from below”. Both local public institutions, enterprises and families have tried to implement new care policies and/or find new welfare mix equilibriums in order to meet the emerging care needs of the population. However the recent economic crisis and the austerity plans have also contributed to weakening the processes of “modernization from below”.

In 1994 as Cambodia emerged from the nightmare of the years of Khmer Rouge terrorism the author was invited by the Cambodian Government to assist in a review of its prisons and he travelled across the country, often with an armed escort, working with the new Director of Prisons who had himself spent years in solitary confinement in Vietnam. At that point the number of prisoners in the country was around 2,000. By 2010, when the author again visited the prison population had increased to 14,000 and it now stands at 36,000, with resultant severe overcrowding. The use of imprisonment in Japan and the national peculiarities of the way its prisons operate are a case study of the relationship between prisons and the society in which they exist as well as a reflection of public and social attitudes not only to prisoners as a whole but also to specific sectors of the community. One disturbing expression of this is the growing proportion of prisoners who are isolated elderly men and women who require a level of personal support which prisons cannot provide.

This is the first of two chapters which examine poor law ‘enabling acts’. This chapter considers the importance of Thomas Gilbert’s Act, passed in 1782. Gilbert’s Act was passed with the intention that those parishes adopting it would place the ‘vulnerable’ sections of the poor within a workhouse and allocate employment and distribute outdoor relief to the able-bodied. The Act also intended to promote industry and good morals amongst the poor, allowing parish officers to require them to work within the workhouse and embark on teaching programmes for children. This chapter examines the adoption of the Act in southern England, and then its implementation. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, and the pursuit of more economical modes of relieving the poor became ever more important, the Act was adapted in ways which could have actually contradicted Gilbert’s intentions.

On the basis of the conclusions reached in chapter 3, there are two ways to implement a Citizen's Income: one demographic group at a time (children, then elderly people, then people in the ‘third age’, then young adults, and finally the rest), or by starting with a small Citizen's Income for everyone and then increasing it. Both methods would be feasible. Implementation will, in practice, be a more meandering process, so ‘Universal Credit’ might be a step along the road. The chapter discusses ways in which public debate, and debate amongst policy-makers, might evolve, and also explores the group and individual psychological processes involved. Government policy-making principles are discussed, and a Citizen's Income is found to fit them. The chapter also discusses the different levels at which a Citizen's Income might be implemented: in one country, regionally, and globally.

Population ageing is both a challenge and an opportunity. A challenge to the various welfare regimes, an opportunity to move towards a more comprehensive, sustainable and integrated life-course approach to active ageing. Moving from the premise that a high employment rate is the only way to secure long-term sustainability for any welfare system, this chapter focuses on the policy reforms that have been devised and implemented, at both the national and the local level, to increase the employment rate of elderly people, highlighting the possible trade-offs. While attention is paid to the institutional and economic realities of the Southern European countries, the final section will consider the extent to which the results and recommendations drawn from the analysis of the ageing question in the countries of the Northern Rim can provide a guide to policy for the other Mediterranean countries.

The 1980s saw a grassroots movement that capitalized on the disintegration of collective institutions and the weakening of the planned economy to reclaim religious sites in Rui’an and Wenzhou, a highly symbolic moment that reversed the trend of destruction and expropriation of traditional ritual space since 1898. Yet the movement was not just about religion. It occurred as a social response to a larger issue—the instability of property rights during decollectivization—and has dramatically revitalized traditional rural organizations. The co-option and repackaging of Elderly People Associations (EPAs) as a proxy for temple reclamation allowed local residents to reinvent communal religion, circumventing the problem of legality and securing a stable existence for territorial temples. However, local EPAs have grown beyond their early role as a cover for religious activities. As they grow socially and economically, drawing retired cadres and other village elites, they are moving toward the center of village politics.

Environmental assessment is closely related to the impact environments make on people. Places that induce anxiety and stress in childhood may be regarded with dismay later in life. The relationship between people and their environments may be conceived in physiological, psychological, or ethnological terms, or, which is often the case, by concepts borrowed from these three fields simultaneously. The description of the relationship can be kept either at a molecular or a molar level. The former may be exemplified by the effect of noise on blood pressure, while the latter may be the home's impact on the developing child. The present chapter constitutes an attempt to formulate a model at the molar level of human-environment interaction, largely based on knowledge from the neuropsychological discipline. For the sake of clarity I will first discuss some of the basic concepts employed in contemporary model building in neuropsychology. I will then suggest that these concepts may be brought together into what I have called the basic emotional process. I will support this construct by results from previous research on emotion, and also demonstrate the remarkable congruence between the physiological and semantic branches of this research. Using the emotional process as a focus, a model of human-environment interaction will be proposed, which describes how the person may feel and act under the influence of the physical and social environment, mediated by his or her individual reaction tendencies. The presentation will be illustrated by reference to field studies and experiments carried out by our group since the mid-1960s. Ample use will also be made of studies carried out elsewhere. However, the chapter does not, in the conventional sense, constitute a review of the existing literature on environmental assessment. Instead, it presents one view on assessment, which naturally leads to a specific organization of the existing evidence. One advantage of the proposed model is that it has the capacity to incorporate recent findings of the neurosciences in a detailed and precise way. The model may also be developed and tested further in this direction. Another advantage is that the model has proven to be a useful tool in the environmental design process.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a review of past research and theory in environmental cognition from the perspective of life-span developmental psychology, to suggest future directions for work in this area, and to lay the groundwork for questions of application that are discussed elsewhere in this volume. Before it is possible to address these goals, however, it is essential to establish what is meant by “a life-span developmental approach to environmental cognition.” The first section of the chapter is thus devoted to a discussion of these definitional issues. The second section provides a selective review of past research. The research has been chosen to illustrate how changes in individual development in a variety of domains (e.g., development of logical classification skills in the cognitive domain, or development of interpersonal attachment in the socioemotional domain) may have consequences for environmental cognition. The review of past work leads to the observation that most research has focused on how environmental cognition is derived from direct experience in environments. It is argued that another extremely influential source of environmental cognition is through exposure to representations of environments. Thus, the final section of the chapter contains discussions of the roles of environmental representations for environmental cognition, and descriptions of some recent research in this area. In the original conceptualization of the conference on which this volume is based, Evans and Gärling (1987) defined environmental cognition as … the processes involved in the perception and cognition of spatial information in the real world. Most of this research has not examined preference or evaluation. Instead the focus has been primarily on understanding the cognitive processes themselves and how they are influenced by person variables (e.g. age, gender, familiarity) and by environmental variables such as landmarks, path structures, or overall organizational factors, (p. 2) … This definition works well for the purpose intended, that is, for distinguishing environmental cognition from environmental assessment, on the one hand, and from decision making and action, on the other. In part, these distinctions are congruent with a taxonomy developed earlier (Liben, 198la), which similarly placed environmental cognition in a broader context.

The task we have been set is to review developmental theory concerning how individuals act in real-world environments. To simplify this difficult task we have emphasized the developmental span of childhood, the area of our professional expertise. Before proceeding with the review, a few comments regarding the framework of this book and, within it, the definition of our task will enable us to illuminate some of the assumptions inherent in the structure of this volume and to explain how this has affected our conceptualization of the problem. The stated goal of this book is to look at the separate areas of human relatedness to the environment that are recognized by “most research in environmental psychology”: environmental cognition, environmental appraisal and decision making, and action in environments (see Table 1.1 in Chapter 1 of this volume). We agree that although such a separation of cognition and evaluation from action is a reflection of the dominant tendency of research, it is true of only some theories. To accept this division and to discuss primarily action would prevent us from emphasizing those theorists who have argued that human relatedness to the environment must be thought of holistically and dynamically. Consequently, although we have tried to emphasize action, this chapter actually deals simultaneously with cognition and appraisal. The question of why more integrative and holistic theories have been largely ignored is itself important. We argue that the answer lies in a fear by psychologists of such research because it cannot easily meet the traditional tenets of what constitutes good theory—building through experimental research design. A second problem in the task definition is the use of the word “space.” We should not simply be addressing “spatial decisions and actions” but environmental decisions and actions. In the field of environmental psychology the terms “space” and “environment” are commonly used synonymously. We think of space as just one characteristic of objects in the environment. Unfortunately, space is the characteristic that most environmental cognition research has addressed. This is somewhat understandable, for environmental psychology finds its distinctiveness in the study of the large-scale environment in which space (spatial relatedness) is the most distinguishing variable.

In this chapter, I sketch an integrated account of environmental assessment, cognition, and action throughout the individual’s life span. Zimring and Gross (this volume) have already described how the schema is structured to include all three aspects; Canter (this volume) has extended this to stress the social context of meanings and actions in which these schema operate; and this chapter accepts and develops their positions. What further can a life-span approach add to the arguments advanced in these earlier integrative chapters? Liben (this volume) has already stated the case most powerfully with respect to her topic, environmental cognition; and it can as easily be applied to evaluation and action. A life-span approach enables development to be put in context: what earlier stages have so far equipped the individual to do, what the demands of the current situation are on the individual, and how variations at the present stage can affect later development. Taking this developmental perspective throws the emphasis on process and on the adaptive nature of the environmental schema for the particular life stage reached by the individual. As such, the perspective provides a test bed for examining the range of theoretical relationships between affect, cognition, and action in the environment advanced in earlier chapters. The life-span approach can also serve to reintroduce into the field a sense of the importance of individual differences, and continuities of individuality through life, which is conspicuously missing from many of the earlier chapters. The developmental tradition within psychology has not, as a whole, stressed individual differences as much as has done the life-span developmental. The life-span perspective has been much concerned with continuities and developments within the individual, as goals and tasks change over the life course. Much mainstream “developmental” research lacks this sense of continuity, being often presented as a series of snapshots of the typical child at different ages or stages. In contrast, the life-span approach, as Liben’s chapter reminds us, emphasizes the processes whereby developments occur, and conceptualizes this development as affected by biological changes, psychological development, changes in the individual’s social role and context, cultural forces, and historical changes during the individual’s life span.