Aging strains labor market
October 30, 2009, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
CHINA'S labor market is facing a structural change that is going to extend into the upcoming decades and pose tremendous challenges for companies in all industries, in all areas.
Maximum Employment Marketing Group's recent nation-wide talent market research collected, analyzed and reported real-time data that addresses the main issues in China's talent market.
The supply of lower-skilled laborers is still in abundance, but the demand for them will further decrease as China joins the knowledge revolution.
Companies are already experiencing difficulties in finding higher-end professionals with the right skills and experiences.
The situation described here will translate into tremendous pressure on the labor market when you put the aging population against China's growing economy. Generally, according to the composition of its age structure, a population can be classified into three types of development: growing, stationary and declining.
If we look at the population pyramids of China, the US and Europe for the last 50 years, clearly, there are differences.
The US and European populations have entered a stationary stage since the 1970s. It is the point where US and European economy were peaking.
But in Western countries, population aging didn't become a problem until the economy came into a stage of maturity.
China has to face the consequences much earlier and faster than Western countries. This trend will develop faster and be more severe due to a number of factors, including the family planning policy and the imbalance in male-female ratio.
The proportion of the population aged 65 and older will reach seven per cent before the end of this decade.
After that, the speed of the population aging process will be accelerated, and the growth of the elderly population will be much faster than that of any other age groups in China.
It is estimated that the growth rate from 2000 to 2030 will be 32.1 per 1,000 for the elderly population, while it is only 5.1 per thousand for the overall population.
Around the period 2025-2030, the proportion of the elderly will reach 15 per cent of the total population. This means that it will take only about 25-30 years for China's population to reach the degree of aging that was reached by the United Kingdom's population over a 50-year period.
In short, the labor market is and will increasingly be put under pressure. The "talent war" as portrayed by McKensy in 1996 is already a reality.
(The article is adapted from a report by the Maximum Employment Marketing Group. The views are its own.)
Maximum Employment Marketing Group's recent nation-wide talent market research collected, analyzed and reported real-time data that addresses the main issues in China's talent market.
The supply of lower-skilled laborers is still in abundance, but the demand for them will further decrease as China joins the knowledge revolution.
Companies are already experiencing difficulties in finding higher-end professionals with the right skills and experiences.
The situation described here will translate into tremendous pressure on the labor market when you put the aging population against China's growing economy. Generally, according to the composition of its age structure, a population can be classified into three types of development: growing, stationary and declining.
If we look at the population pyramids of China, the US and Europe for the last 50 years, clearly, there are differences.
The US and European populations have entered a stationary stage since the 1970s. It is the point where US and European economy were peaking.
But in Western countries, population aging didn't become a problem until the economy came into a stage of maturity.
China has to face the consequences much earlier and faster than Western countries. This trend will develop faster and be more severe due to a number of factors, including the family planning policy and the imbalance in male-female ratio.
The proportion of the population aged 65 and older will reach seven per cent before the end of this decade.
After that, the speed of the population aging process will be accelerated, and the growth of the elderly population will be much faster than that of any other age groups in China.
It is estimated that the growth rate from 2000 to 2030 will be 32.1 per 1,000 for the elderly population, while it is only 5.1 per thousand for the overall population.
Around the period 2025-2030, the proportion of the elderly will reach 15 per cent of the total population. This means that it will take only about 25-30 years for China's population to reach the degree of aging that was reached by the United Kingdom's population over a 50-year period.
In short, the labor market is and will increasingly be put under pressure. The "talent war" as portrayed by McKensy in 1996 is already a reality.
(The article is adapted from a report by the Maximum Employment Marketing Group. The views are its own.)
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