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Introduction: Retirement Migration to the Global South—Global Inequalities and Entanglements

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Retirement Migration to the Global South

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Abstract

International retirement migration has developed into a wide field of research since the 1990s. However, it is only in the last few years that research has drawn attention to the growing evidence of retirement migrations from relatively affluent countries in the “Global North” to lower-income countries in the “Global South”. In the introductory chapter Schweppe provides a detailed account on this multi-layered phenomenon which points to the increasing global interconnectedness of aging in relatively affluent countries and is highly entangled with global inequalities. She shows how it is pushed by constrained life situations in old age in high-income countries and how social problems and unmet needs of old age in the Global North are shifted to the Global South. She also demonstrates the manifold implications of retirement migration to the Global South: the ambivalent consequences for the retirement migrants’ lives, the severe impacts on the destination countries including processes of recolonization and the reproduction and enhancement of social inequalities, as well as the significant profits for the booming retirement industry from exploiting global inequalities and structural disadvantages of countries in the Global South.

Schweppe, C. (ed.) (2021): Introduction: Retirement Migration to the Global South—Global Inequalities and Entanglements. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Bell, 2017; Bender et al., 2017, 2020; Benson & O’Reilly, 2018; Green, 2014, 2015, 2017; Horn et al., 2016; Howard, 2019; Maher & Lafferty, 2014, 2020; Ono, 2008, 2010, 2015; Sunanta & Angeles, 2013; Wong et al., 2017.

  2. 2.

    See Benson, 2013, 2015; Croucher, 2009, 2012, 2018; Dixon et al., 2006; Hayes, 2015, 2018; Lizárraga Morales, 2010;

    Miles, 2015; Sloane et al., 2020a; Spalding, 2013; Viteri, 2015.

  3. 3.

    Eurostat (2018) defines at-risk-of-poverty rate as “the share of people with an equivalised disposable income (after social transfer) below the at-risk-of-poverty threshold, which is set at 60 % of the national median equivalised disposable income after social transfers”.

  4. 4.

    Pruitt and LaFont (1995) first introduced the concept of romance tourism in their study of female tourists to Jamaica and differentiated it from that of sex tourism. They explain that they use the term “romance tourism” to distinguish the sexual relationships of women tourists with local men from sex tourism because “these liaisons are constructed through a discourse of romance and long-term relationship, an emotional involvement usually not present in sex tourism” (p. 423).

  5. 5.

    What it might mean to import a hitherto unknown form of elder care to Costa Rica is obviously of no concern to Propertyshelf.

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  1. Institute of Education, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany

    Cornelia Schweppe

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    Cornelia Schweppe

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Schweppe, C. (2022). Introduction: Retirement Migration to the Global South—Global Inequalities and Entanglements. In: Schweppe, C. (eds) Retirement Migration to the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6999-6_1

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