Financial Post Bloomberg News by Tom Hancock 3/2/2023
The population reaching the age of 60, a common retirement age in China, has 'increased dramatically' China’s number of working people has fallen by more than 41 million in the past three years, reflecting both the coronavirus pandemic’s toll on the economy and a decline in the working age population.
Some 733.5 million Chinese people were employed in 2022, according to the country’s statistics bureau. That’s down from 774.7 million in 2019. The decline in employment over that period is almost equal to Germany’s entire workforce, which was about 44 million in 2021, according to the World Bank.
The data stems from a rapid rise in the number of people retiring, likely raising pressure on Beijing to accelerate unpopular plans to raise official retirement ages The drop reflects factors such as higher youth unemployment due to the pandemic as well as a shrinking number of people in the “classic age group of the working-age population,” said Stuart Gietel-Basten, a demographer at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The number of people in China aged between 16 and 59 has been gradually declining since 2012. Over the past three years, the number in that group dropped 38 million to 857.6 million — a much more rapid fall than in previous years.
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https://financialpost.com/news/economy/china-lost-40million-workers-3-years
