Skip to main content

Graying of China

An update to my post about Japan Needing More Babies. I read an article in the WSJ (a summary of an LA Times article) a few weeks back about the graying of China and the implications it will have on its economy in the coming decades.

Here's an excerpt from the article:
While China's population is relatively young, by the middle of the century it is set to become one of the world's grayest societies. Today, less than 8% of China's population is 65 or older. By 2050, that proportion will rise to 24%, compared with Europe's 28% and 21% in the U.S. In sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of elderly individuals will rise to less than 6% from 3% now.

Moreover, at 1.3 billion, China's population is impressive now but will be less so in the future. According to U.N. projections, most of the world's total population increase from 6.5 billion today to 9.2 billion in 2050 will come from sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim world. India's population is expected to overtake China's in 2025. China, whose so-called one-child policy has led to a steep decline in the country's birth rate in the past several decades, will contribute only 4% of the rise in the world's population up to 2050.

The economic burden of 300 million+ elderly people on China's economy will be tremendous. That is more than the entire population of the U.S.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...
3 comments
Read more

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

I found this opinion piece ( Democrats aren't innocent bystanders ) interesting on how both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for polarizing the electorate and undermining some of its faith in democracy. It references two other posts that were pretty good as well: The Disease of Delegitimization The Weimarization of the American Republic The second article is really long and heavy on history.  But given all of the comparisons people make between the current times and those of post-WWI Germany, I found it interesting to dive in to understand where the comparisons are coming from and how close we really are.  The short answer is that we aren't that close (phew). Seems like post-WWI Germany was incredibly fragile.  This was a good excerpt that summarized it: So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boo...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Fortunate 400

So there's rich, and then there's super rich. I recently read an article in the WSJ about the top 400 taxpayers based on income. Pretty incredible statistics. Those top 400, or what they call the "Fortunate 400", pulled in $85.6 billion in income in 2005. That's over $200 million each ... in one year! Here's a quick graphic to drive that home: Very impressive. There's all the obvious jaw-dropping statistics to go with that. For instance, to make the cut to be in the 400 you had to pull in at least $100 million. With an average of $200 million, that means there's people pulling in well over that number. Obviously, quite crazy numbers, and generally speaking not necessarily anything to be concerned about. I'm all for capitalism. But one of the more disheartening statistics was that adjusting for inflation, the minimum income to make the cutoff into the Fortunate 400 has nearly tripled since 1992. That's probably not a good sign as I imagine that...
Post a Comment
Read more