Such news has led to much discussion that China has lost the demographic dividend and will therefore face new difficulties in economic development. It got to the point that the relevant statements had to be refuted at the level of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. “I would like to emphasize that the demographic dividend is determined not only by quantitative, but also qualitative indicators. China’s population is over 1.4 billion. As Premier Li Qiang has already said, the demographic dividend national demographic has not disappeared, human capital the dividend is increasing – all of this maintains our strong development potential,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the same day when releasing statistics from China. ‘UN.
Observers note that China is increasingly using the concept of “human capital dividend” rather than “demographic dividend”, since the former focuses not on population as such, but on the level of education and labor productivity. These numbers are constantly increasing. Today in the PRC, a representative of the working-age population receives an average of 14 years of education. One in four people has a higher education: among the 875.5 million people of working age in the PRC, there are more than 240 million university graduates.
Thanks to a growing human capital dividend, China is steadily growing its economy even as its working-age population shrinks. It started to decline since 2012 and at the beginning of this decade it decreased by around 40 million. At the same time, China from 2012 to 2022 was able to more than double its national GDP: from 51.9 trillion to 121 trillion yuan. What to say to those who complain about the “loss of the demographic dividend”?
In the current decade, experts predict, China’s working-age population will shrink by another 60 million. However, there will be no noticeable negative effects from this, economists are sure. Thus, the “labour shortage” in cities can be easily met by increasing migrant labor from villages, Wang Tao, a senior economist at investment bank UBS, said earlier. In the current decade, by increasing the efficiency of agriculture through increased mechanization and robotization, the village can release an additional 40 million workers for industrial centers, she said.
In general, according to demographers’ forecasts, the rate of decline of China’s population over the next few decades will be low. They will accelerate significantly only around the middle of the century: at this time, the population of the PRC will begin to decrease by 10 million people per year, predicts the Chinese Center for Population and Development Research ( CCPR). This gives the Chinese government a significant “window of time” to adjust the economy to the declining demographic dividend and increasing the human capital dividend.
To this end, work is already underway in four main areas. First, it is an increase in labor productivity. “Population reduction is quite capable of going hand in hand with economic development, provided there is a steady increase in labor productivity,” said KCINR researcher Liu Houlian. The challenge is first of all about the introduction of industrial innovations, research and development work. To do this, the country needs a huge pool of highly qualified personnel, and China is sparing no money for their training. Thus, according to forecasts by the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies at Georgetown University (United States), by 2025, twice as many PhDs in engineering and mathematics will leave the walls of Chinese universities as in the United States. United. The active training of scientific personnel is already bringing tangible dividends to China: in 2019, China overtook the United States in terms of patents filed, ranking first in the world rankings.
Demographers predict that the rate of decline of China’s population over the next few decades will be low.
Moreover, in order to increase labor productivity, China is following the path of robotization of production and service sector. If in 2015 there were 49 industrial robots per 10,000 workers in the country, by 2021 there will be 246, and by 2025, according to forecasts, this figure will increase to 500. According to experts, by 2030, robots are fully capable of replacing people. for 99% of jobs in agriculture, 98% in construction, 94% in the development and maintenance of energy networks, 25% in the insurance sector and 22% in the banking sector. The machines thus compensate for the drop in supply on the national labor market.
Second, it is a more efficient allocation of labor resources. Professor Tong Yufeng of Beijing University of Economics and Business proposes to achieve this goal by equalizing the rights of migrant workers from villages with the local urban population. Recall that the number of migrant labor in China in 2022 in China reached 295.6 million people.
Third, it is an increase in the retirement age. The corresponding decision can be taken this year. Li Shi, a professor at Zhejiang University, estimates that there are about 145 million people of working age in China today, and they may well continue to contribute to economic development.
Finally, fourthly, it is about supporting the birth rate so that the rate of population decline does not become an avalanche. To this end, at the dawn of the last decade, China began to relax the policy of restricting procreation.
Read the Latest Science and Technology News Today on The Eastern Herald.
