When 70 Is the New 60: Healthy Aging and Its Growing Impact on Korea’s Labor Market

The IMF study finds that Koreans are aging in significantly better health, with today’s 70-year-olds having physical capacity comparable to 60-year-olds two decades ago, and that this “healthy aging” has substantially boosted labor force participation and delayed retirement. Overall, improved health has offset a large share of Korea’s demographic drag by raising older-age labor supply, showing that healthier lives can turn population aging into an economic opportunity.

Researchers from the International Monetary Fund’s Research Department, working with data generated by institutions such as the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging, the Gateway to Global Aging Data, and national statistical agencies across Asia, examine whether healthier lives can soften the economic blow of population aging in Korea. The country faces one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in the world, with ultra-low fertility and sharply rising life expectancy threatening to shrink the labor force and strain public finances. Yet the authors argue that conventional narratives are overly pessimistic because they overlook a critical transformation: older people are not just living longer, but aging in better physical health, potentially enabling them to work longer than previous generations.

Evidence That Koreans Are Aging More Healthily

Using microdata covering individuals aged 50 and above between 2006 and 2020, the study documents a clear pattern of “healthy aging” across birth cohorts in Korea. After controlling for age, gender, education, and household wealth, people born more recently are consistently healthier at a given age than those born earlier. The improvements appear across both objective and subjective measures of health, including grip strength, self-rated health, and the ability to perform daily and instrumental activities such as walking, dressing, shopping, and managing finances. These findings suggest that better aging outcomes are not simply driven by higher incomes or education levels, but reflect genuine improvements in physical capacity.

When Seventy Becomes the New Sixty

The scale of Korea’s healthy aging gains is particularly striking. Translating the statistical results into intuitive terms, the authors find that by 2022 the average 70-year-old in Korea had grip strength comparable to that of a 60-year-old in 2006. Functional measures of health show similarly large gains, with improvements equivalent to reversing eight to thirteen years of age-related decline. While other Asian economies such as China, Japan, India, Malaysia, and Thailand also display some signs of healthier aging, Korea stands out for the size and consistency of its gains, especially in objectively measured physical strength.

Health as a Driver of Labor Supply

The paper then addresses the key economic question: Does better health actually keep older people working? Simple correlations show that healthier individuals are more likely to participate in the labor force and less likely to retire, but the authors go further by identifying causal effects. Using the incidence of chronic diseases as an external shock to health, while controlling for lifestyle factors such as smoking, obesity, alcohol consumption, and physical inactivity, they isolate the impact of health on labor market behavior. The results show that health has a powerful causal effect: improvements in physical health significantly raise labor force participation and delay retirement, with effects far larger than those implied by simple correlations.

How Healthy Aging Changes Korea’s Economic Outlook

When the estimated health effects are combined with observed health trends, the implications are substantial. A decade’s worth of healthy aging, measured through improvements in grip strength, increases labor force participation among older Koreans by nearly 20 percentage points and sharply reduces retirement rates. Even more conservative self-reported health measures imply meaningful gains. Overall, the authors estimate that healthy aging increased the labor supply of older individuals in Korea by about 1.9 percentage points per year between 2006 and 2020, accounting for a large share of the observed rise in participation at older ages. The effects are strongest among people in their 50s and 60s, men, and individuals with lower education or wealth, suggesting that healthy aging may also help reduce certain labor market inequalities.

The study concludes that healthy aging is not merely a public health success but a major economic opportunity. Preventive healthcare, disease prevention, and policies that promote healthy lifestyles can yield large economic dividends by expanding the effective labor force. However, the authors caution that health gains alone are not enough. To fully harness the benefits, they must be paired with labor market reforms, age-friendly workplaces, lifelong skills development, and pension systems that encourage longer working lives. Korea’s experience, the paper suggests, shows that population aging need not inevitably weaken growth; if societies invest in healthier lives, they can also sustain longer and more productive working careers.