An Assessment of Mexico’s Situation Based on three Global Indexes on Healthy Aging, and its Use on the Design of Public Policy

The development of synthetic indexes to measure how societies undertake population aging has become relevant during the last decade due to international interest in responding to demographical changes and in elevating older adults’ standards of living. The measurements proposed are the Global Age Watch Index (GAI), the Active Aging Index (AAI), and the Aging Society Index (ASI). This document aims to present and discuss Mexico’s results on all three indexes and to contribute to the general discussion on the indexes’ ability to design and implement public policies in specific contexts. Mexico got different results from each index, and the exercise helped identify some challenges of the indexes. The general balance between the referential framework and the methodology of the indexes is that they are a cross-sectional measurement of the situation of older adults. However, the actual posits leave aside a lifetime perspective and, for the GAI and ASI, a gender perspective. Moreover, they lack a solid theoretical discussion, and their methodologies fail to incorporate an adjustment for the demographical conditions of the countries, which can hardly yield comparable results.