Studies relating ageing and countries’ economic performance address mostly developed economies. However, extant studies demonstrate that less developed countries (LDC) and emerging economies (EE) are reaching the transition process faster than those from developed regions, which renders the speed of ageing, besides ageing, a critical variable to explore in this context. Comparing system dynamic panel data estimations for 40 LDC, 19 EE and 28 developed countries (DC), between 1990 and 2013, we uncovered that ageing is detrimental to countries’ economic growth, with noticeable nuances depending on countries’ development level. The current level of ageing significantly and negatively impacts on DC's growth but not on that of LDC or EE. For these latter groups, the most relevant issue is the speed of ageing. The current annual growth of old age dependency ratio significantly diminishes EE's growth prospects whereas the lagged annual growth of the ageing index and the old age dependency ratio significantly curtails LDC's growth. Such results emphasize the need for urgent public policies that might mitigate the imbalance in LDCs’ age structure before the speed of ageing leads LDCs to become even much poorer.

The ageing of populations worldwide has implications for workforces in developed countries and labour shortages have increasingly become a political concern. Governments in developed countries have responded by increasing the retirement age as a strategy for overcoming the fall in labour supply. Using bibliometric techniques, we reviewed 122 articles published between 1990 and 2018 to examine the effectiveness of the strategy in addressing the labour shortages and, in particular, to identify the factors that contribute positively to maintaining worker participation within an ageing workforce at an organizational level. The results identified five organizational factors that support continued participation: health, institutions, human resource management (HRM), human capital and technology tools. Employers will increasingly need to develop "age-friendly" workplaces and practices if they are to recruit and retain older workers.

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Today's working population is expected to experience a longer and healthier life than previous generations did. This, combined with a currently shrinking workforce, means the participation of older adults in the labor market is expected to positively contribute to national economic and social development. Policymakers have therefore implemented a series of reforms to motivate and encourage both employers and employees to embrace the prospect of an aging workforce and to respond to the associated challenges of such a demographic change in the workplace. This paper aims to provide an overview of recent policy initiatives in this context and to identify the role of technology in major international initiatives in overcoming the key challenges faced by developed countries. We have conducted a scoping review to obtain large volumes of peer-reviewed and gray literature. Our findings suggest that the stakeholders (researchers, government agencies, employers, and communities) are not only aware of the current issues relating to the aging population but also understand the importance of policies in terms of retaining older people in the workforce. In particular, our results indicate that technology, in both the public and private sectors, can be leveraged as a tool to facilitate older adults' participation in the workforce.