Nation's aged will strain system
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At the rate at which Chinese society is aging, each retiree will be supported by less than two taxpayers by 2059, according to a seminar held by the country's top advisory body.
And the country's labor pool - in seemingly endless supply over the past three decades - is approaching a predicted turning point in 2015, when it will start to shrink, said Yang Yansui, a research fellow with Tsinghua University.
A sample of 1 percent of China's population in 2005 revealed that people aged above 65 accounted for 7.7 percent of the populace. Under standards set by the United Nations, that means China is already an aging society.
The seminar noted that China is in the midst of building a pension fund system to cover each citizen, but a lot of people are yet to be included.
"A fair, long-term, unified, actual and sustainable pension fund plan is most urgent," said Yang at the seminar held on Wednesday in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan Province, China's most populous province with about 100 million people.
China is projected to have a workforce of 810 million people by 2035, but also nearly 300 million people aged above 65.
Beginning in 2030, retirees as a group will be at least one-fourth the size of the workforce. By 2053, they'll be at least one-third the size of the workforce. And by 2059, retirees could equal 45.2 percent of the workforce, Yang said.
To address the problem, Yang suggested gradually delaying the retirement age to expand the workforce and increase income and productivity of seniors.
In a similar vein, Shanghai and some other cities are looking to change their strict family planning policies.
The fertility rate of Shanghai's registered population was 0.83 last year, lower than the national level of 1.6 to 1.8 and the 1.7 average in developed countries in the West.
More than 22 percent of the city's registered population is 60 years of age or older. The percentage will increase to 28.1 in 2015, 36.6 in 2025 and 38 in 2030.
People 14 years or younger in 2008 were 1.16 million, or 8.4 percent of the total population. The figure is lower than the national average of 10.6 percent.
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