China’s working age population is decreasing

BEIJING — The proportion of China’s working-age population in the country’s total population is decreasing, according to official data released Wednesday.

According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, people aged 16 to 59 made up 61.3% of mainland China’s population last year, down from 62% the previous year.

The country is rapidly aging as people have fewer children and live longer. Over the past decade, the number of births has fallen, even as the Chinese government has begun to ease household restrictions on one child.

Even though China’s overall population is declining, the shrinking working age ratio means that fewer people have to support a larger proportion of the population.

China’s total population will decrease by more than 2 million people from the previous year to 1.41 billion in 2023. This is a much larger decline than the 850,000 year-on-year decline in 2022, the first time the country’s population has declined since the 1960s.

Analysts at UBS said in a report last month that China’s working-age population has been declining since peaking in 2011.

“With a shrinking working-age population and structural changes in labor supply and demand dynamics, we are seeing a shift from automation and robotics to digitalization and AI to 1) meet labor demand and 2) increase productivity while reducing costs. “Technology adoption is accelerating,” analysts said. .

They pointed out that China still has opportunities to increase the productivity of its workforce, including by promoting vocational education, leveraging the surplus labor supply in rural areas, and raising the retirement age.

China’s youth unemployment rate rose to a record high of more than 20% last year, due to slowing economic growth and a mismatch between available jobs and skills.

In the summer, the Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing the youth unemployment rate, saying it needed to revise its calculation methods.

The bureau resumed reporting the numbers this week, along with a new breakdown of unemployment rates by more age categories, citing the time it takes for people to transition from graduation to the workforce. The updated figures do not include those still in school, or about 60% of people aged 16 to 24, the agency said.

As of December, the unemployment rate for 16-24 year olds was 14.9%, the unemployment rate for 25-29 year olds was 6.1%, and the unemployment rate for 30-59 year olds was 3.9%.

The bureau claimed the citywide unemployment rate was 5.1%.

The total number of people aged 16 to 59 in mainland China will be 864.81 million in 2023, more than twice the total population of the United States at 334.9 million.

The World Bank’s latest figures, using a wider working age range of 15 to 64, show the sector’s share of China’s population in 2022 fell to 69% from 69.2% a year earlier. .

Data shows that in 2018, that percentage was over 70%.

Despite the decline, China’s working-age population ratio in 2022 exceeded Japan’s 58.5%, the United States’ 64.9%, and Vietnam’s 68.5%.

In India’s case, that share will be 67.8% of the total population in 2022, up from 67.5% the previous year, according to World Bank data.

—CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.