Empowering elderly people in Japan's aging society is the key to reviving and sustaining economic growth in the world's third-largest economy, according to the head of a think tank unit of the Asian Development Bank.

"Demography is the biggest problem for Japanese recovery," Naoyuki Yoshino, dean of the Tokyo-based ADB Institute, said in a recent interview with Kyodo News, pointing to the impact population trends, if left unaddressed, will have in stunting the economic recovery.

Yoshino wants the government to tap into the potential of the elderly as it promotes its growth strategy, one of the three pillars of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic package known as "Abenomics" that also includes massive fiscal spending and aggressive monetary easing.