Aging Before Affluence: Welfare Regime Typologies and Social Protection Sustainability Across Asian Demographic Trajectories

Population aging in Asia is arriving before the institutions to support it. Assessments of social protection usually treat sustainability, adequacy and fairness separately, obscuring how they trade off within one system. This study introduces NTA-SAFE, five indicators derived from the National Transfer Accounts lifecycle identity, applied to Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. Base-year per capita profiles are combined with UN World Population Prospects 2024 populations through 2050, so all movement reflects age structure alone; results are reported across all five WPP series as a demographic sensitivity range. An explicit two-part rule classifies each economy by who provides net transfers to its elderly and by demographic stage. Japan and South Korea are state-led; the Philippines and Indonesia are family-asset-led, retaining the fiscal headroom of young populations. Thailand is transitional and the substantive case, carrying the demographic and fiscal exposure of a state-led system while families supply 78% of net transfer support to its elderly. Thai elderly consumption sits near working-age parity: the exposure lies not in current living standards but in the institutional basis on which they rest. Direction of change is robust in 24 of 25 country-indicator combinations. Higher benefit generosity is consistently associated with a narrower fiscal base, as a budget constraint implies, though five cases cannot establish universality. Whether family-mediated support reproduces life-course inequality into old age is a hypothesis the framework can pose but not test, the accounts carrying no distributional data. Indonesia’s classification is provisional, its profile predating the 2014 health insurance reform. NTA-SAFE is replicable wherever National Transfer Accounts exist.