There is always talk of the scarcity of job opportunities for people over 55 years of age. But you have to know that if you are in this age group, the best autonomous communities to find a job are Madrid, Castilla y León, Navarra and the Basque Country. We are talking about a group made up of 15 million people and currently represent the 26% of GDP and 60% of national consumption.
This is indicated by the ‘Ranking of Territories for the Senior Economy 2021‘, which shows that not all the autonomous communities offer the same conditions and opportunities to people over 55 years of age in terms of employment, access to social and health services and the number of residences and day centers, among others. It also reveals that there are also differences with respect to other indicators, such as life expectancy, the average retirement age, the average amount of the pension and the number of mayors and voters aged between 55 and 75 years.
The work has been presented in Madrid in an act inaugurated by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Government spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, and which has had the participation of José Manuel Inchausti, Vice President of Mapfre and CEO of Mapfre Iberia; Elena Sanz, patron of Fundación Mapfre and general director of People and Organization of Mapfre; Juan Fernández and Iñaki Ortega, director and advisor to the Fundación Mapfre Ageingnomics Research Center, respectively, and directors of the research, as well as Clara Bazán, director of Insurance and Social Security at Fundación Mapfre.
The research, carried out by the Agingnomics Research Center Mapfre Foundation, collects for the first time more than 400 data from different official sources that provide an objective and reliable comparison of the degree of “friendliness” of all the Autonomous Communities with respect to this group and that allow us to understand the senior economy, that is, the set of opportunities that lengthening life entails.
North half, more life expectancy
Asturias (42.5%), Castile and Leon (41.2%) and Galicia (40%) are the territories with the most elderly people; The Balearic Islands (83.4), Navarra (83.35) and Galicia (83.3) are the ones with the highest life expectancy (average years a person is expected to live); and La Rioja (62.7), Castilla y León (61.2) and the Basque Country (59.9), those with the highest healthy life expectancy (average expected years a person lives in the absence of functional limitations or disability from birth). With regard to the average number of years that a person is expected to live after 65 years of age, three others stand out: Galicia, the territory with the highest life expectancy at 65 years of age, with 21.55 years, followed by the Balearic Islands (21.19) and Basque Country (21.15).
Madrid and the Balearic Islands, with more assets
The region with the greatest capacity to generate employment opportunities for the elderly is Madrid (31.8%), which heads the Activity rate, understood as the percentage of active population over 55 in relation to the total population of working age, ahead of the Balearic Islands (31.7%) and Murcia (30.1%). On the other hand, the Autonomous Communities with the highest percentage of employed persons (employment rate) are Castilla y León (23%), Asturias (22.8%) and Cantabria (21.4%); those with the least senior unemployment recorded are País Vasco (6.8%), Navarra (7%) and La Rioja (8.2%); and the three with the highest number of self-employed workers in this age group are Catalonia (92,235), Madrid (91,550) and Andalusia (64,711).
