Cina, mercato lavoro Nyt 06-06-30
Con l’invecchaimento della Cina si prospetta una
carenza di forza lavoro a basso costo
HOWARD W. FRENCH
Si evidenzia a Shaghai, 13,6 mn. di abitanti, l’invecchiamento
della popolazione cinese uno dei maggiori cambiamenti demografici della storia,
con implicazioni per tutta Cina:
– tensioni
nel sistema pensionistico, costi di assistenza;
– carente
offerta forza lavoro, ed aumento del suo prezzo;
– spostamento
impianti e investimenti nelle aeree più interne e in altri paesi asiatici.
———————–
– Il
20% della popolazione di Shanghai è sopra i 60 anni, età pensionabile.
– 100 000
nuovi ultra 60 ogni anno, che si prevede giungerà nel 2010-2020 a 170 000
l’anno, e quindi a 1/3 dei cittadini oltre i 59 anni.
L’invecchiamento della popolazione pone difficili problemi
politici al governo cinese, che negli anni 1950 promosse l’esplosione
demografica e che alcuni anni dopo la morte di Mao nel 1976 invertì la rotta
imponendo la politica di un solo figlio, con un presunto “risparmio” di 390 mn.
di nascite.
La tendenza all’invecchiamento demografico
– mette
a rischio il traballante sistema pensionistico che ha già un forte deficit
anche con il tasso di 4 lavoratori per pensionato;
preme sul sistema di registrazione delle famiglie, che
limita la migrazione interna non consentendo ai giovani lavoratori di
trasferirsi nelle città dove manca forza lavoro, ma l’eliminazione delle
restrizioni alle migrazioni interne potrebbe provocare un eccessivo flusso
migratorio sulle città.
– Con
la scarsità di forza lavoro e l’aumento del suo costo nelle città della costa
orientale, aumenta la pressione a spostare le fabbriche e le manifatturiero ad
alta intensità di forza lavoro in paesi asiatici più poveri, come Vietnam e
bangladesh, ma anche in India, che offre bassi salari e una popolazione molto
più giovane.
– Anche
all’interno della Cina gli investitori esteri hanno iniziato ad allontanare la
fabbriche da Shanghai e da altre città orientali verso l’interno, dove c’è
forza lavoro più giovane e a più basso costo.
In Cina ci sono varie età di pensionamento dai 50 ai 60,
l’aumento dell’età pensionabile ridurrebbe in parte la pressione sul sistema
pensionistico, ma aumenterebbe quella sui giovani in cerca di occupazione.
Il governo ora permette a coppie, che erano figli unici, di avere un
secondo figlio, ed ha eliminato per questi l’attesa di 4 anni tra due nascite;
l’eliminazione completa della regola di un solo figlio è ritenuta improbabile vista
l’esperienza del disastroso boom demografico incoraggiato da Mao; inoltre
l’aumento delle nascite muterebbe solo la struttura della popolazione
prolungando il processo di invecchiamento: l’ampiezza del numero degli anziani
è già una realtà che non può essere eliminata.
Nyt 06-06-30
As
China Ages, a Shortage of Cheap Labor Looms
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI, June 29 — Shanghai is rightfully known
as a fast-moving, hypermodern
city — full of youth and vigor. But that obscures a less well-known
fact: Shanghai has the oldest population in China, and it is getting older in a
hurry.
–
Twenty percent of this city’s people are at least 60, the
common retirement age for men in China, and retirees
are easily the fastest growing segment of the population, with 100,000 new seniors added to
the rolls each year, according to a study by the Shanghai Academy of
Social Sciences. From 2010 to
2020, the number of people 60 or older is projected to grow by 170,000 a year.
–
By 2020 about a third of Shanghai’s population, currently 13.6
million, will consist of people over the age of 59, remaking the city’s social fabric and placing
huge new strains on its economy and finances.
The changes go far beyond Shanghai,
however. Experts say the
rapidly graying city is leading one of the greatest demographic changes in
history, one with profound implications for the entire country.
The world’s most populous nation, which has built its
economic strength on seemingly endless supplies of cheap labor, China may soon
face manpower shortages.
–
An
aging population also poses difficult political issues for the Communist government, which first
encouraged a population explosion in the 1950’s and then reversed course and
introduced the so-called one-child policy a few years after the death of Mao in
1976.
–
That measure has spared the country an estimated 390
million births but may ultimately prove to be another monumental
demographic mistake. With China’s
breathtaking rise toward affluence, most people live longer and have
fewer children, mirroring trends seen around the world.
Those trends and the extraordinarily low
birth rate have combined to create a stark imbalance between young and old. That threatens the nation’s rickety
pension system, which already runs large deficits even with the 4-to-1 ratio of
workers to retirees that it was designed for.
Demographers also expect strains on the household registration system,
which restricts internal migration. The system prevents young workers from
migrating to urban areas to relieve labor shortages, but officials fear that abolishing
it could release a flood of humanity that would swamp the cities.
–
As workers become scarcer and more expensive in the
increasingly affluent cities along China’s eastern seaboard, the country will face
growing economic pressures to move out of assembly work and other
labor-intensive manufacturing, which
will be taken up by poorer economies in Asia and beyond, and into
service and information-based industries.
–
"For the last two decades China has enjoyed the advantage
of having a high ratio of working-age people in the population, but that situation is about to change," said Zuo Xuejin, vice
president of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. "With the
working-age population decreasing, our labor costs will become less
competitive, and industries in
places like Vietnam and Bangladesh will start becoming more
attractive."
India, the world’s other emerging giant, also
stands to benefit, with low
wages and a far younger population than China.
–
Even within China, Mr. Zuo said,
many foreign investors have
begun moving factories away from Shanghai and other eastern cities to inland
locations, where the work force is cheaper and younger.
As remote as many of these problems may
seem today in Shanghai, the country’s most prosperous city, evidence of the changes is already
on abundant display. If Shanghai represents the future of China, it is in central Shanghai’s Jingan
district, where roughly
4,000 people, or 30 percent of the residents, are above 60, that one can
glimpse that future.
Squads of lightly trained social workers
monitor the city’s older residents, paying regular house visits aimed at
combating isolation and assuring that medical problems are attended to.
At 10 a.m. on a recent spring morning,
Chen Meijuan walked up a narrow wooden stairway to the secondfloor apartment
where Liang Yunyu has lived for the last 58 years.
"Good morning, Granny," Ms.
Chen called out as she entered the 100-year-old woman’s small bedroom.
"Did you have a good night’s sleep?"
Ms. Chen, 49, earns about $95 a month as
one of 15 agents who monitor the neighborhood’s elderly population. Her
caseload exceeds 200.
"I usually pay visits to about five
or six households a day, stay a little while and chat with them," she
said. "For Grandma Liang I am a little more focused, visiting two or three
times a week."
After being introduced to a foreign
visitor, Ms. Liang regaled her guests with stories, ranging across the decades
of the 20th century. She recounted the arrival of Japanese invaders in the city
nearly 70 years ago, her opening of a kindergarten in 1958 and her husband’s
arrest and death in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution 40 years ago.
"My daughter always invites me to
live with her family, but I feel embarrassed to be with them," said,
pausing from her tales. "I’m worried I might die in her home, so I prefer
staying where I am."
Her son, Zha Yuheng, 76, a grandfather
and retired textile industry worker, lives with her now, which also concerns
her. "I am taken good care of here," she said, "but living with
my son leaves him with a big burden, I’m afraid."
Mr. Zha protested that his mother was
little trouble at all. "Every morning I get water for her and make sure it
is not too hot or too cold, and she handles everything else on her own,"
he said. "She gets up, dresses, makes the beds and even makes food for
herself."
In many wealthy societies the very old
are candidates for nursing
home care. That sector is still tiny in China, though, especially compared with
the size of elderly population. Zhang Minsheng opened the city’s first private nursing home in 1998
in an industrial area far from central Shanghai. It is now 95 percent
occupied.
"People were not willing to enter
nursing homes in the past, because they were considered places for those
without descendants," Mr. Zhang said. "Now, from the standpoint of
ordinary people, it is becoming a normal thing."
The average age of the residents of Mr.
Zhang’s home is 85, and most live several to a room, sleeping on narrow beds
separated by flimsy partitions. Many pass the daytime hours in long corridors
furnished with chairs, where they chat or simply stare into the distance.
The sheer magnitude of the aging
phenomenon has Chinese officials and academics grasping for answers, but almost
everyone agrees that there are no easy fixes. Population experts here speak of
"patching one hole and exploding another."
–
China has a wide range of retirement ages, generally from
50 to 60. Raising the retirement age would relieve pressures on the pension
system but make it harder for young people to find jobs. And it would be resented by many elderly people, most of whom have
missed out on China’s economic boom.
Lifting restrictions on internal
migration raises the unwelcome prospect of a mass migration, while abandoning
the one-child policy would be politically unpalatable.
The government has already tinkered with
the policy. It now allows
husbands and wives who were their parents’ only children to have a second
child, for example, and has eliminated a four-year waiting period between
births for those eligible to have a second child.
But Chinese demographic experts say the leadership is unlikely to abolish
the one-child rule, because it is reluctant to admit that one of its
signature policies was in any way a failure — particularly in view of the disastrous population boom encouraged
by Mao in the 1950’s.
Moreover, lifting child-bearing
restrictions might not help. Poorer people in the interior might have more
children, but the rising middle class probably will not, experts say.
"More births would only change the structure of the population and
prolong the aging process" of the society as a
whole, said Ren Yuan, a professor at the Population Research Center of Fudan
University in Shanghai. "But
it has nothing to do with the number of old people. The scale of this large
group has already become a reality. The beds you’ve got to add in
nursing homes, the labor you need to take care of the old, is a reality than
can’t be changed."
New York Times