The Evolution of the Longevity Economy: From an Ageing Society to Industrial Clusters, Reading Ageing as an Industry, Not a Cost

 Is ageing only a matter of cost? Pension burdens, rising healthcare spending, shortages of care workers, a shrinking working-age population. These are usually the first terms in which we discuss ageing.

I have worked in the care field for many years, so I know this language well. In my own work, older people are often spoken of first as people who need care. That is why Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging, a 2024 volume edited by Joseph F. Coughlin, Director of the MIT AgeLab, and Luke Yoquinto, confronted me with a very different set of questions. Can a society in which people live longer create new markets and industries? Can those industries cluster in particular places and become new engines of regional growth?[1]

This article begins with those questions.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the global population aged 60 and over will rise from 1 billion in 2020 to 1.4 billion in 2030, when one in six people worldwide will be aged 60 or older. By 2050, that population will reach 2.1 billion, while the number of people aged 80 and over will triple to 426 million.[2] The United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024 projects that by the mid-2030s, people aged 80 and over will outnumber infants under the age of one, and by the late 2070s, people aged 65 and over will outnumber those under 18.[3] Ageing is no longer an issue confined to a handful of advanced economies. By 2050, 80 percent of older people worldwide will live in low- and middle-income countries.[2]

Ageing is advancing especially rapidly in some developed countries. As of September 2026, Japan had 36.24 million people aged 65 and over, accounting for a record 29.6 percent of its population; among major countries, Italy (25.6 percent) and Germany (24.2 percent) followed.[4] South Korea entered a “super-aged society” in December 2024, when the share of people aged 65 and over exceeded 20 percent.[5] As of August 2026, 11.28 million people in South Korea were aged 65 and over, representing 22.1 percent of the population.[6] These countries are among the first to face the demand created by the Longevity Economy, and to face it at scale. But facing that demand early does not mean a Longevity Hub will emerge there first.

In this article, the Longevity Economy means more than a consumer market for older people. It is the economic sphere created as longer lives and ageing reshape industries such as healthcare, care, housing, finance, tourism, and technology. Starting from the questions raised in Longevity Hubs, I look at four issues. First, how should ageing and the Longevity Economy be understood as an industrial strategy? Second, how has the concept expanded from a consumer market for older people to industrial restructuring, an economic and social system, and regional clusters? Third, what would it take for the Longevity Economy to become a mature economic sphere in its own right? Fourth, how might advances in AI and bio-healthcare reshape its industrial structure and growth path? I close by considering objections to this perspective.

1. Is Ageing a Cost or an Industry?

Longevity Hubs reads more like a book on industrial strategy than a conventional policy book on ageing. It looks at places where companies, universities, healthcare institutions, researchers, investors, and public agencies connected to ageing are beginning to interact and generate new forms of innovation. The MIT AgeLab describes the book as an exploration of how Longevity Hubs emerge: places where economic and innovative activity for older populations is disproportionately concentrated.[1]

A Longevity Hub is not simply a place with many older people or a city with numerous age-friendly services. The idea is that local demand created by ageing and longer lives can connect with companies, universities, hospitals, technology, capital, and government to generate new products and services, firms and jobs, investment and markets. As these links deepen and firms, talent, capital, and knowledge become concentrated in one place, an industrial cluster around the Longevity Economy can begin to form.

The central question behind the Longevity Hub concept is: “Can the Longevity Economy generate agglomeration economies comparable to those of Silicon Valley?”

The phrase that captures this ambition most clearly is the “Silicon Valley of an aging world.” Silicon Valley is more than a concentration of start-ups. It has become the emblem of an industrial cluster in which universities, technology, firms, specialized talent, venture capital, and an entrepreneurial culture reinforce one another and create economic value beyond the sum of the individual firms. In its introduction to Longevity Hubs, MIT News likewise described Boston and other regions as competing to become the “Silicon Valley” of an aging world.[7]

The book begins with Greater Boston as a leading example of an emerging Longevity Hub. The region already has a dense base of assets: MIT and Harvard University, world-class hospitals, bio-healthcare companies, financial institutions, venture capital, start-ups, and specialized talent. The challenge is not to invent an entirely new industry, but to connect and reorganize these existing strengths around the Longevity Economy as a new organizing axis for industry.[1]

Demand is equally important. Traditional cluster theory has tended to emphasize supply-side factors such as firms, technology, capital, universities, and talent. A Longevity Hub adds the everyday needs of older people: health, housing, mobility, finance, leisure, and care. Older people in the region are not merely recipients of welfare services. They are consumers, users, participants in testing, co-designers of services, and actors in the market.

The book’s distinction among Local Input, Global Input, Local Aims, and Global Aims reflects the same logic.[1] A region can draw on local demand and resources, attract technology, capital, and talent from outside, and then take locally developed innovations into domestic and global markets. In simple terms:

Local demand → local innovation → global markets

The Longevity Economy resembles tourism in this respect. Tourism does not mean the hotel industry alone; transport, food, culture, shopping, finance, platforms, and other activities are tied together by the common demand created by tourism. The Longevity Economy works in a similar way. Healthcare, care, housing, finance, insurance, mobility, food, tourism, culture, education, AI, robotics, and bio-healthcare can all be connected by the needs of a society in which people live longer.

Why, then, should clusters matter as a growth strategy for the Longevity Economy?

The economic value of a cluster does not lie simply in having many firms in the same place. Geographic concentration can raise productivity and innovation by accelerating knowledge spillovers, the movement of specialized talent, transactions among firms, collaborative research, entrepreneurship, and investment. The OECD identifies tradable clusters—industries that sell goods and services to markets beyond their own region—as an important source of regional innovation and productivity growth.[8]

The OECD’s 2012 Cluster Scoreboard compared 80 major innovation clusters using six indicators of firm performance: the share of new and young firms, employment growth, sales growth, profitability, liquidity, and solvency. That matters because the scoreboard judges clusters not by how many institutions they contain, but by how firms actually grow and perform.[9]

Silicon Valley is the symbolic example of these agglomeration effects. The 2025 Silicon Valley Index, published by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, reported that roughly $69 billion in venture capital flowed into Silicon Valley in 2024. The same report put per capita income in the region at about $157,000.[10] High housing costs and inequality are part of the picture as well. For industrial strategy, the important point is that a dense concentration of universities, technology, capital, talent, and firms can raise the innovative capacity and value added of an entire region, not just the fortunes of individual companies.

The same question now applies to the Longevity Economy. When healthcare, bio-healthcare, care, housing, finance, tourism, and technology are connected within one region, can they create additional economic value beyond the sum of the individual industries? That “cluster premium” has not yet been demonstrated in the Longevity Economy. But as a regional industrial strategy, its success will depend in large part on whether such a premium can be created.

2. The Longevity Economy Has Evolved from a Consumer Market to Industrial Clusters

The term “Longevity Economy” was not always used as broadly as it is today. Over time, the discussion has widened from a consumer market for older people to the restructuring of industries, an economic and social system, and finally regional industrialization and clusters.

2.1. It Began by Measuring the 50+ Consumer Market

One of the earliest and most influential approaches came from AARP and Oxford Economics. Oxford Economics’ 2016 report The Longevity Economy explains that AARP defines the Longevity Economy as “the sum of all economic activity driven by the needs of Americans aged 50 and older.” This includes not only the goods and services purchased directly by the 50+ population, but also the additional economic activity induced by that spending.[11]

According to the report, the first study published by AARP and Oxford Economics in 2013 estimated that the U.S. Longevity Economy generated $7.1 trillion in annual economic activity. By 2016, the estimate had risen to $7.6 trillion.[11] At this stage, the Longevity Economy was essentially a way of showing how large the 50+ market was and how much economic influence it carried.

The scale has continued to grow. AARP’s Longevity Economy Outlook 2026 estimates that Americans aged 50 and over generated about $12.5 trillion in economic activity in 2024, equivalent to 43 percent of U.S. GDP, and supported 46 percent of all U.S. jobs.[12] These figures should be interpreted carefully: they combine all consumption by people aged 50 and over with the wider economic effects of that spending. They do not mean that sales by a discrete “longevity industry” equal 43 percent of GDP. Even so, the figures show that the Longevity Economy is no longer a niche market; it is an economic sphere measurable at the macroeconomic level.

2.2. Coughlin Reframed Longevity as a Question of Industrial Restructuring

Coughlin’s 2017 book The Longevity Economy broadened the argument. The MIT AgeLab presents the book as a challenge to conventional stereotypes about older consumers, workers, and innovators, whose health and wealth vary enormously. Rather than focusing on the size of the older market alone, Coughlin asks how the reality of longer lives changes companies’ products, services, and business strategies.[13]

At this stage, the Longevity Economy comes to mean more than a set of products for a particular age group. It describes an industrial transition in which established sectors—including finance, healthcare, travel, real estate, retail, technology, and transport—are redesigned for longer lives and changing patterns of consumption.[13]

2.3. The World Economic Forum Framed the Longevity Economy as an Economic and Social System

The World Economic Forum’s 2024 Longevity Economy Principles broadened the concept again. WEF treats the Longevity Economy as a question of the economic and social conditions required for people of all generations to live healthy and financially resilient lives in a society shaped by longer lifespans. It identifies six principles: financial resilience, financial education, healthy ageing, multigenerational labor markets and lifelong learning, social connection and purpose, and the reduction of longevity inequality.[14]

This approach extends the Longevity Economy beyond a consumer market or a particular industry to a system encompassing finance, health, employment, learning, and social participation. Projecting that the global population aged 60 and over will reach 2.1 billion by 2050, WEF treats the Longevity Economy as a long-term structural transition requiring action by business, government, and civil society.[14]

2.4. Longevity Hubs Brought a Spatial Dimension to the Discussion

Longevity Hubs brings a spatial dimension to the discussion. If the Longevity Economy is growing and reshaping industries and institutions, where does that economy actually cluster and innovate? Beginning with Greater Boston, the book compares cities and regions including Louisville, Newcastle, and São Paulo to examine the geographic concentration of longevity innovation.[1][7]

50+ consumer market → industrial restructuring → economic and social system → regional industrialization and clusters

The Longevity Economy, then, is not simply a new label for the “silver industry.” It is becoming an economic and industrial concept for understanding how longer lives reshape multiple industries and generate new firms, investment, employment, and value added.

3. What Would It Take for the Longevity Economy to Become an Economic Sphere in Its Own Right?

What would it take for the Longevity Economy to become a distinct and mature economic sphere? Read together, AARP and Oxford Economics’ measurement of the market, Coughlin and the MIT AgeLab’s work on industrial and regional innovation, WEF’s systemic approach, and the development path of innovation clusters suggest six conditions.

Clusters in particular have long been a subject of regional economics and industrial policy. The OECD describes productivity as fundamentally spatial, shaped by the way firms, industries, talent, and infrastructure come together in particular places.[15] For the Longevity Economy to mature, then, the market must do more than grow in size. The firms, talent, capital, and knowledge that build and sustain this economy must also become spatially organized.

3.1. The Market Must Be Measurable

The production, consumption, value added, employment, investment, and exports of the Longevity Economy must be measured repeatedly. AARP and Oxford Economics’ work quantifying the economic activity of the 50+ population in the trillions of dollars was a starting point for turning “longevity” from an abstract social phenomenon into a measurable economic sphere.[11]

3.2. It Must Spread Across Industries

Healthcare and care alone cannot capture the full scope of the Longevity Economy. Products and business models across finance, housing, tourism, food, mobility, education, insurance, culture, AI, robotics, and other established industries need to be redesigned around longer lives. That is why Coughlin’s argument matters.[13]

3.3. A Distinct Value Chain Must Emerge

The Longevity Economy needs a value chain that runs from demand discovery → R&D → testing → investment → production → distribution → consumption → exports. A living lab is an approach in which technologies and services are tested and improved with users in real-life settings. Within this value chain, the living lab is a mechanism for identifying demand and conducting testing and validation, not an end in itself.

3.4. Firms, Talent, and Capital Must Accumulate

Specialized firms and start-ups, researchers and skilled professionals, and investment institutions must continue to emerge, while people, knowledge, and capital circulate among them and business relationships deepen. Market size alone does not make an industry mature. It also needs a self-reinforcing cycle in which firms and talent grow and capital is reinvested.

3.5. Regional Clusters Must Form

Universities, hospitals, firms, investors, and government must interact repeatedly within particular regions so that knowledge and talent circulate and entrepreneurship and commercialization take place. Longevity Hubs compares Boston and other regions precisely to examine the regional conditions under which longevity innovation becomes concentrated.[1][7]

3.6. It Must Connect to Global Markets

The Longevity Economy cannot stop at solving the problems of older people in one locality. Products and services developed and tested locally must be capable of reaching longevity markets in other regions and countries. The competitiveness of a Longevity Hub depends on combining local embeddedness with global reach.

By these measures, several pieces are already in place. The 50+ market is being measured repeatedly; the concept now reaches across finance, healthcare, housing, tourism, technology, and other industries; and WEF treats it as an economic and social system.[11][14] What has not yet clearly emerged is a globally recognized Longevity Economy cluster comparable to Silicon Valley. MIT News can still ask which region will become the “Silicon Valley of an aging world” because that position remains open.[7]

The Longevity Economy is already a real and substantial market, but as a distinct industrial ecosystem and a global regional cluster, it is still taking shape.

4. How Will AI and Bio-Healthcare Change the Longevity Economy?

The future of the Longevity Economy will be shaped by more than ageing itself. AI and advances in bio-healthcare will also matter. Until now, its basic driver has largely been on the demand side: people live longer, so new products and services are needed. In the future, AI, precision medicine, digital health, and biomedical technologies may add a supply-side force by helping to extend healthspan and manage disease risks earlier.

4.1. An Industry Is Emerging Around Measuring and Predicting Ageing

Research on ageing clocks that measure biological ageing rather than chronological age is advancing. A 2026 Perspective in Nature Aging describes progress in estimating not only whole-body biological age but also the biological age of individual organs using omics and medical imaging data, noting that organs may age at different rates. The authors suggest that regularly assessing organ-specific biological age could help build personalized maps of ageing and support earlier intervention.[16]

If such technologies are sufficiently validated in clinical settings, the basic pathway of healthcare could expand from “disease onset → diagnosis → treatment” to “measurement of ageing status → risk prediction → preventive intervention → continuous management.” This could draw health screening, insurance, digital health, precision medicine, wellness, food, and other industries more deeply into the Longevity Economy.

4.2. AI and Drug Discovery Still Sit Between Expectations and Results

AI is already widely used to analyze complex life-science data—including genomics, proteomics, medical imaging, and clinical data—and to identify drug targets or design candidate compounds. But current achievements should not be overstated. A critical 2026 review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery found that although AI methods have been developed and applied extensively, their clinically meaningful impact on delivering safer and more effective medicines to patients more quickly remains limited.[17]

AI-driven drug discovery is already attracting substantial industrial investment, but technological expectations have not yet been fully converted into clinical outcomes. The same distinction matters in the Longevity Economy. Ageing biomarkers, geroscience, multi-omics, regenerative medicine, and related fields may become high-value areas, but many of these technologies still require further clinical validation and standardization.

4.3. The Center of Gravity May Shift from “Products for Older People” to a “Healthspan Industry”

The deeper industrial shift may lie in where the Longevity Economy’s center of gravity moves. Until now, it has grown largely around the consumption and service demand created by ageing. In the future, technologies and services that help people live longer in good health may become an increasingly important part of the economy.

Closer links among AI-based health prediction, measurement of biological ageing, precision medicine, genomics and multi-omics, drug discovery, regenerative medicine, digital health, smart homes, CareTech, and care robots could also change the value-added structure of the Longevity Economy. Everyday support services and high-value AI and bio-healthcare industries would then sit within the same economic ecosystem.

From an industrial-economics perspective, three changes stand out. First, high-value AI, bio-healthcare, and precision-medicine industries may become more closely integrated with markets traditionally centered on everyday support. Second, long-term service and platform models linking data, diagnosis, monitoring, prevention, and treatment may grow relative to one-off product sales. Third, industries built around local demand from older people may increasingly reach beyond domestic markets and sell technology, data, and services globally. AI and bio-healthcare could therefore change not only the scale of the Longevity Economy, but also where value is created and how firms compete internationally.

If ageing created the demand for the Longevity Economy, AI and bio-healthcare could provide the supply-side innovation that turns that demand into higher-value industries.

Future Longevity Hubs, then, are unlikely to succeed simply because they have large older populations. Their advantage will depend on how tightly they can connect AI, bio-healthcare, medical and clinical capabilities, universities, firms, capital, and living lab-based testing. The regional concentration and innovation examined in Longevity Hubs takes on even greater significance in the age of AI and bio-healthcare.

5. The Case for the Longevity Economy Must Answer Two Objections

Viewing the Longevity Economy as an industrial strategy invites two obvious objections.

“Isn’t the Longevity Economy ultimately a market aimed at affluent older people who can afford to pay? Won’t poorer and less healthy older people be left even further behind?”

This is a legitimate concern. It is one reason WEF includes the reduction of “longevity inequality” across gender, race, and socioeconomic groups among its six principles.[14] Silicon Valley, too, combines remarkable innovation performance with high housing costs and inequality. But the objection misses something. The case for Longevity Hubs is not based on purchasing power alone. Older people can also take part in innovation as testing participants and co-designers. And if 80 percent of the world’s older people will live in low- and middle-income countries by 2050, affordable and widely deployable solutions may represent a larger market than expensive products.[2] The issue is not the Longevity Economy itself, but whether inclusion is built into it from the start.

A second criticism is that the language of “industry” simply repackages the costs of ageing. That concern deserves to be taken seriously. Industrial strategy will not make pension pressures, healthcare costs, or shortages of care workers disappear. But an ageing society does not have to be described only in the language of cost. Managing costs and fostering industry are complementary, not competing, goals. If prevention and early-management technologies genuinely extend healthspan, they may slow the growth of some healthcare and care costs. At the same time, the firms and jobs created around those technologies may broaden the economic base that supports social protection. The Longevity Economy, in this reading, is not a substitute for welfare but a possible economic foundation for making welfare more sustainable.

Conclusion: The Longevity Economy Is a New Language of Industrial Strategy

What I found most compelling in Longevity Hubs was the way it recasts the familiar social phenomenon of longevity in the language of industry. For many years, the central question of an ageing society has been, “How can we bear the rising costs?” The perspective of the Longevity Economy adds another question: “How can we turn the new needs and technologies created by longer lives into engines of growth for industry and regional economies?”

The Longevity Economy is not yet a fully formed industry or a settled theory. Its scope, however, is clearly expanding. It has moved from the 50+ consumer market to the restructuring of existing industries, an economic and social system, and regional industrial clusters. Advances in AI and bio-healthcare may mark another turning point.

The next stage of competition is unlikely to be only about which country responds best to an ageing society. It may also be about which countries and cities can organize the new demand created by longer lives into industries, concentrate firms, talent, and capital, and create new value added for global markets. Japan, Italy, and South Korea are among the first countries to confront the most advanced stages of ageing. Whether they can convert that early exposure into an advantage will depend on their ability to turn the demand they already face into industry.

In the end, the success of the Longevity Economy will depend less on how many older people a country or region has than on how effectively it can turn those needs into higher-value products, services, and firms, build those capabilities into regional clusters, and reach global markets. In that sense, a Longevity Hub should be read not as a spatial extension of welfare policy, but as a new strategy for regional industry.

[About the Author]

Kim Sung-ki, Ph.D. in Social Welfare

Director, The Care Biz Lab

Chair, SE Empower Social Cooperative

Email: skkwelfare@gmail.com

 

References

[1] Coughlin, J. F. & Yoquinto, L. (eds.) (2024). Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging. MIT Press. (MIT AgeLab book page) https://agelab.mit.edu/books/longevity-hubs

[2] World Health Organization (2025). “Ageing and health” (Fact sheet, updated 1 October 2025). WHO. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/aging-and-health

[3] United Nations (2024). “UN projects world population to peak within this century” (press release on World Population Prospects 2024, 11 July 2024). UN DESA. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2024/07/press-release-wpp2024/

[4] Nippon.com (2026). “Proportion of Elderly Population in Japan Hits Record High near 30 Pct” (September 2026, citing Jiji Press and estimates by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). https://www.nippon.com/en/news/yjj2026092000208/proportion-of-elderly-population-in-japan-hits-record-high-near-30-pct.html

[5] The Korea Herald (2024). “South Korea now officially ‘super-aged’ society” (24 December 2024, citing Ministry of the Interior and Safety resident registration statistics). https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10022641

[6] Ministry of the Interior and Safety, Republic of Korea (2026). “Resident Registration Population Statistics: Older Population by Region” (August 2026). https://jumin.mois.go.kr/etcStatOldAge.do

[7] MIT News (2025). “The regions racing to become the ‘Silicon Valley’ of an aging world” (9 January 2025). MIT. https://news.mit.edu/2025/regions-racing-become-silicon-valley-aging-world-0109

[8] OECD (2018). “Global trends and regional links: Jobs, clusters and global value chains.” In Productivity and Jobs in a Globalised World. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/productivity-and-jobs-in-a-globalised-world_9789264293137-en/full-report/component-7.html

[9] Temouri, Y. (2012). “The Cluster Scoreboard: Measuring the Performance of Local Business Clusters in the Knowledge Economy.” OECD LEED Papers, No. 2012/13. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/5k94ghq8p5kd-en

[10] Joint Venture Silicon Valley (2025). 2025 Silicon Valley Index. Joint Venture Silicon Valley. https://jointventure.org/publications/institute-publications/2706-2025-silicon-valley-index

[11] Oxford Economics (2016). “The Longevity Economy” (13 September 2016). Oxford Economics and AARP. https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/the-longevity-economy/

[12] AARP (2026). “Longevity Economy Outlook 2026” (2 June 2026). AARP Global Thought Leadership. https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/work-finances-retirement/economics-aging/longevity-economy-outlook/

[13] Coughlin, J. F. (2017). The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World’s Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market. PublicAffairs. (MIT AgeLab book page) https://agelab.mit.edu/books/the-longevity-economy

[14] World Economic Forum (2024). “Longevity Economy Principles: The Foundation for a Financially Resilient Future” (15 January 2024). WEF. https://www.weforum.org/publications/longevity-economy-principles-the-foundation-for-a-financially-resilient-future/

[15] Tsvetkova, A. et al. (2020). “The spatial dimension of productivity: Connecting the dots across industries, firms and places.” OECD Regional Development Working Papers, No. 2020/01. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/ba5edb47-en

[16] Zalesky, A., Wen, J. & Tian, Y. E. (2026). “From whole-body to organ-specific biological age clocks.” Nature Aging 6, 961–969. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-026-01113-2

[17] Bender, A. et al. (2026). “Artificial intelligence in drug discovery — what it is, where we stand and the path forward.” Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41573-026-01496-2

Future Longevity Hubs, then, are unlikely to succeed simply because they have large older populations. Their advantage

The phrase that captures this ambition most clearly is the “Silicon Valley of an aging world.” Silicon Valley is more than a concentration of start-ups. It has becom