Drawing on 25 years of research in urban and rural South India, this book explores how social and economic transformations impact later life for the low-income majority population. It examines the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991, the Western economic crisis of 2008 and the role of neo-liberalism in the social welfare system. In doing so, the book reveals how later life is shaped by the interaction of local and global processes, and how the older poor of the Global South are situated within, and contribute to, the global economy. It demonstrates the mismatch between lived experience and the conceptualisations of later life that inform public policy discourse and implementation and proposes new ways forward for global ageing theory and research.