Asia’s ageing population is enough to give policymakers grey hairs
“Asia remains the growth champion of the world,” the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said last week, but in the medium term there’s a large grey cloud on the horizon. Asia is fast getting old and the harsh reality is that it could do so before it gets rich.
Policymakers across the region will have to contend with these demographic challenges. “Institutional support is not yet in place to respond to the rapid rise in ageing. Pension systems remain unsustainable despite recent policy reforms,” analysts at Standard Chartered have written.
Last week’s IMF regional economic outlook for Asia-Pacific addressed the ageing question, noting that “in past decades Asia has benefited significantly from demographic trends, along with strong policies” and had gained economically from a “demographic dividend” deriving from the fact that the size of the labour pool had grown faster than the number of dependents.
But it said “this dividend is about to end for many Asian economies” and “in a global context, Asia is shifting from being the biggest contributor to the global working-age population to subtracting hundreds of millions of people from it”.
Full Content: South China Morning Post
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