They are scattered all over Asia and come from all socioeconomic backgrounds. You will find them in places like Chiang Mai and Phuket in Thailand. They can be found in the Philippines, Malaysia and Bali in Indonesia. You can even find them in Cambodia, Vietnam and China.
They are foreign retirees — mainly Australians, Europeans and North Americans fleeing cold winters and the prospect of spending their twilight years in a nursing home.
Although small in number, they are a growing minority in a region where retirement from Japan to India has become big business.
As Asia’s economic prosperity has grown, so too has its aging population.
The Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) has estimated that Asia’s elderly population will reach 922.7 million by the middle of this century.
The United Nations estimates that in India the number of people aged 60 and above will rise from the current level of around 8 percent to more than 18 percent by 2050. In Southeast Asia, the number will rise from 8 percent to 22 percent and in China from 12 percent to over 33 percent.
According to the ADB, Asia is on track to becoming the oldest region in the world within the space of just a few decades.
The multilateral lender says the “policies and systems of governments in Asia are hardly prepared for this vast demographic shift”.
Even so, some governments — Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines — are cashing in on retirement, or the “silver economy” as it is now being called.
According to Singapore-based Ageing Asia, a marketing consultancy that specializes in aging in the Asia-Pacific region, by 2017 India will have more than 118 million people aged over 60, Japan 30 million, China 217 million and 24 million in Indonesia.
The business of aging — from developers building retirement villages for foreigners or locals, to medical care and companies specializing in holidays for the elderly — is expected to be worth more than $3 trillion in Asia by 2017, according to Ageing Asia.
John Harvey, a former partner with global accountancy firm Ernst & Young, spent more than 40 years in the region. But rather than return to his homeland of the United Kingdom he chose to retire in Malaysia.
“It was an easy decision to make,” he tells China Daily Asia Weekly.
“I wanted a place which had a pleasant climate, with a reasonable cost of living, where English is spoken and where the medical facilities were first class … Malaysia ticked all the boxes,” he says.
Harvey lives in a condominium complex on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.
“It is within easy access of everything I need,” he adds.
Malaysia actively encourages foreign retirees as part of a government development program which is tied in with its growing medical tourism sector.
Under the Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) plan, visas are valid for 10 years depending on whether or not retirees can meet set financial requirements which include having a fixed deposit of at least $47,500 in a Malaysian deposit account or a pension of $3,160 a month.
Thailand offers a similar deal, while Singapore actively targets the high-end retiree.
In the Philippines, some 160,000 foreigners have taken special resident retiree visas. This does not cover those who have retired on investor or tourist visas and those who opted to marry locals.
No government agency in the Philippines has comprehensive data on foreign retirees specifically. Of those with retiree visas, the top nationalities include Chinese, South Koreans and Japanese.
They can stay in the country so long as they pay a cash guarantee of $5,000 and have at least $1,500 in monthly pension income.
Source: China Daily
