BEIJING – The number of Chinese who are in their working
years will peak in 2013 and then decline afterward, according to a recent
report by Allianz, a leading German financial group.That finding provides
further evidence that the Chinese population is getting older on average and
that good reasons exist to loosen the country’s family-planning policy.The
national policy, which has been in place since the late 1970s, restricts most
urban couples to having a single child.”If China sticks to its current
retirement age, the consequences of the one-child policy will be felt on the
labor market from 2013 onward,” said Michael Heise cheap football shirts, chief
economist and head of corporate development at Allianz.By 2013, the number of
people between the ages of 15 and 59 in China will peak at around 920 million,
the Allianz report showed. According to the latest census data, China’s
population stood at 1.34 billion on Nov 1, 2010. From 1990 to 2000, the average
rate of annual population increase was 1.1 percent. The following decade saw
that rate cut nearly in half, to 0.6 percent.
Meanwhile, because of declining fertility rates and
increasing life expectancies, the average age of the population continued to
increase. The percentage of people younger than 15 in the total population fell
from 22 percent in 2000 to 16.6 percent in 2010, while the percentage of those
who are 60 or older rose from 10.4 percent to 13.3 percent, according to the
National Bureau of Statistics German football shirt.
The old-age dependency ratio – calculated by dividing the number of people aged
65 and older by the number of persons who are between the ages of 15 and 64 and
are in the working population – will rise from 11.9 percent to 42 percent by
the middle of the century, the bureau said. “If one takes into account that the
official retirement age in China is still 50 or 55 for women and 60 years for
men, the relation between people having already retired and those of working
age is even worse,” Heise said.There are now 18 persons aged 60 or older for
every 100 persons who are between the ages of 15 and 59 in China. According to
the latest United Nations’ estimates, the ratio Bayern football shirt will increase to somewhere between 40 and 100 by 2030 and to
between 64 and 100 by 2050.Such a change will pose many difficulties to the
second largest economy in the world. Stories on labor shortages in China were back
in newspapers in January. The story this year, though, came with a twist:
Companies in central and western China, which usually have an easy
time hiring, are also entering the fray for labor.
Rising labor costs, together with labor shortages, are
pressing enterprises to move faster to make improvements and become more
efficient. Workers, for their part, are bringing home larger salaries, making
them more willing to spend and causing economic growth to be driven more by
consumption.Meanwhile, the older average age of the population has put the
country’s insurance system on shaky footing, as fewer young workers contribute
to an insurance pool that is being drawn on more by the old.And according to a
joint survey conducted by Taikang Schalke football shirt Life Insurance
and Peking University’s China Center for Insurance and Social Security
Research, more than half of Chinese citizens have not purchased commercial life
insurance, which is often needed as a protection against certain risks not
covered by the public system.”The swift establishment and improvement of a
‘demography-sustainable’ social security system, with a strong capital-funded
pillar, are all the more important,” said Heise.
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