January 2023
27Jan

Migration could prevent a looming population crisis. But there are catches

To developmental economist Lant Pritchett, "population decline" is a mild way to describe what could be a global demographic crisis. "The reaction is often 'ho-hum' as the rates [of population decline] are slow and hence the issue seems small and in the future," he told NPR in an email. But the problem is not small, he said, and falling birth rates could upend economies. Last week, China reported population decline for the first time in more than 60 years, raising questions about...

January 27, 2023
News,
Read more...
17Jan

China’s Population Falls, Heralding a Demographic Crisis

The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible. The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment that led to widespread famine and death in the 1960s. Chinese...

January 17, 2023
News, ,
Read more...
09Jan

Bracing for the silver tsunami

Since 2011, sales of adult diapers in Japan have outpaced those for infants, reflecting a decline in the country’s fertility rate (live births per woman) from 3.66 in 1950 to around 1.5 by the early 1990s. Since then, Japanese fertility has remained stuck far below the “replacement rate” (2.1), amounting to a mere 1.3 in 2021. And geriatric Japan is not alone. Fertility rates have also dropped below the replacement level in all eurozone countries, and they are strikingly low...

January 9, 2023
News, ,
Read more...
06Jan

The Effect of Pension Wealth on Employment

By Sebastian Becker, Hermann Buslei, Johannes Geyer & Peter Haan This study provides novel evidence about the pension wealth elasticity of employment. For the identification we exploit reform-induced variation of pension wealth that is related to the number of children but which does not affect the implicit tax rate of employment. We use a difference-in-differences estimator based on administrative data from the German pension insurance and find that, on average, the negative employment effect of pension wealth is significant and economically...

January 6, 2023
Articles, Pension design, , ,
Read more...
05Jan

Korea to take drastic measures to tackle population decline

The government will take drastic measures to tackle Korea's demographic crisis of its falling birthrate and rapidly aging society, said Na Kyung-won, head of the presidential committee on Aging Society and Population Policy, who floated the idea of writing off loans for married couples who give birth to children. "Now is the absolute last chance to take action on the imminent demographic crisis. Responding and adapting to the demographic change is a matter of the nation's survival and sustainability," Na,...

January 5, 2023
News, ,
Read more...
04Jan

Chipping away at the mystery of immortality: The race to cheat death as populations age in Asia

As Asia ages faster than any other region in the world, the race is on to find ways to slow down the process. There are now 630 million people aged 60 years and above in Asia Pacific, representing 60 per cent of the world's older population. By 2050, that number is projected to increase to 1.3 billion. The research in longevity has advanced to the point of several potential interventions mostly in animal models that might work in humans, said Prof...

January 4, 2023
News, ,
Read more...
02Jan

Robots Are Taking Over Jobs, but Don’t Panic Yet

One might easily think that robots are causing significant disruption in the labor market by replacing human workers, especially when considering examples like chatbots serving as more efficient customer service representatives or computer programs handling package tracking and transportation without human intervention. According to a study by Eric Dahlin, a sociology professor at Brigham Young University, there is no need to fear an imminent robot takeover of jobs. Dahlin’s research suggests that the rate at which robots are replacing humans...

January 2, 2023
News
Read more...

December 2022
28Dec

South Korea. Population Declines for 36th Month due to Low Births

The country's population declined for three consecutive years due to a combination of plunging birth rate, society’s accelerated aging and the COVID-19 pandemic. According to data from Statistics Korea on Wednesday, there were 20-thousand-658 newborns in October, down zero-point-four percent from a year earlier. The on-year gain was the lowest for October since the agency began compiling related data in 1981. The tally for newborns has seen an on-year decline for 83 straight months since December 2015. The number of deaths in...

December 28, 2022
News, ,
Read more...
28Dec

A long-term illness crisis is threatening the UK economy

Along with sky-high inflation and energy costs, a Brexit-related trade tailspin and a recession in progress, the U.K. economy is being hammered by record numbers of workers reporting long-term sickness. The Office for National Statistics reported that between June and August 2022, around 2.5 million people cited long-term sickness as the main reason for economic inactivity, an increase of around half a million since 2019. The number of “economically inactive” people — those neither working nor looking for a job —...

December 28, 2022
News, , ,
Read more...
20Dec

UK. Early retirement and our ageing population are causing labour shortages, says Lords report

Economic inactivity has increased by 565,000 people since the start of the pandemic - a stark reversal of what was happening before 2020. The biggest contributor to this change has been an increase in early retirement, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee concluded today in its report “Where have all the workers gone?” Background Earlier retirement is the biggest of four factors that have made it harder to fill jobs. Increasing sickness; changes in the structure of migration; and an...

December 20, 2022
News, ,
Read more...