Historic move in China. The country has approved a plan to raise the retirement age for the first time since 1978 in a bid to stem the decline in its working population amid a severe demographic crisis that is putting the economy under control.
As announced this Friday by the official press agency ChinaThe country’s top lawmakers have approved a plan to gradually delay retirement over the next 15 years, raising the retirement age for men to 63 from the current 60 and for women to 58.
The change will take effect on January 1, 2025. The move comes after the country’s ruling Communist Party announced in July that the retirement age would increase “voluntarily and flexibly.”
Retirement age remains unchanged in China one of the lowest in the world despite the fact that life expectancy has increased significantly in the country. Since at least the 1970s, the threshold for office workers has remained at 60 for men and between 50 and 55 for women. Although there have been other attempts, they have not been successful. The last time an increase in the retirement age was debated was in 2008, but the motion was unsuccessful.
China’s demographic crisis of an aging and shrinking population is jeopardizing the future workforce and thus the sustainability of the pension system. With the new plan to allow more people to work longer, the government is seeking to counter demographic hurdles in the world’s second-largest economy, but it risks increasing public discontent amid an economic slowdown.
The lengthening of working life increases the tax base and delays access to social benefitseasing the pressure to fund pensions at a time when, moreover, the birth rate is in free fall, setting a record last year.
Demographic projections suggest that people aged 65 and over will make up 30% of the population by 2035, up from 14.2% in 2021, according to a report by the public broadcaster. Video surveillance.
The B side of the measure
A wave of outrage has already broken out on social media, with some users complaining about the slow pace of the job market and others pointing out that employers often discriminate against older candidates, a problem the government promised to address last month.
Eric Zhu, analyst at Bloomberg Economicssaid the move would help the country in the long term, but risked damaging confidence at a time when the revival of growth depended on it: “This could exacerbate an already acute problem of high youth unemployment, as older educators stay in their jobs for longer,” it said in a report, referring to the rise in the unemployment rate for people aged 16 to 24 to 17.1% in July.
