Baby Boom to Bust

This opening episode takes us to four countries all grappling with declining birthrates and potential economic decline. Catholic Italy: a country with one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, Japan: where there are now more dogs than young children, Australia: where careerism has spawned a multi-million dollar dating industry, and in China: where the governments one-child policy has taken the country from one extreme to another within a generation.

The second episode takes us into the lives of people across the world already impacted by the inevitable march of global ageing. To China to investigate the plight of the elderly in the countryside; Australia, to meet the sandwich generation which finds itself trapped between caring for both grown up children and frail parents; to Japan who are looking to robots rather than immigrants to care for their senior citizens; and to Italy, the country which for generations sent its own workers abroad, now depends on illegal immigrants to care for its elderly.