[Global Times Comprehensive Report] Editor's Note: The 32nd APEC Leaders 'Informal Meeting will be held in Gyeongju, South Korea. According to South Korean media reports, this meeting included "responding to demographic changes" as a comprehensive topic for the first time. As the proportion of the population aged 60 and above in the Asia-Pacific region gradually increases, it is expected to reach about 1/4 of the region's total population by 2050. This structural change is profoundly reshaping the regional development picture: it not only provides financial, medical, and pensions to various countries. The pension system has brought pressure and opened up new growth space for the development of the silver economy and technological innovations such as artificial intelligence, making promoting high-quality population development a common issue for all economies. The topic setting of this meeting reflects the desire and consensus of Asia-Pacific economies to transform this "demographic opportunity" into a "demographic dividend" through regional cooperation.
Demographics is not limited to low fertility.
"This is the first time that artificial intelligence and responding to demographic changes have been included as comprehensive topics at APEC meetings. Both topics are general trends that have changed the era we live in." In a report in South Korea's "Daily Economy", Yoon Song-mi, chairman of the APEC Senior Officials Meeting (SOM), emphasized this. How to understand "comprehensive issues"? Taking responding to demographic changes as an example, Yin Chengmei explained thatAPEC had previously only discussed demographic issues through subsidiaries, and related discussions were limited to healthcare areas such as low birth rates, and this time South Korea hopes to gather broad views to gain insight into the impact of demographic structural changes on South Korean society, including aging, and explore policy changes and regional consensus needed to address new trends.
Statistics from the South Korean Bureau of Statistics and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that South Korea’s 65-year-olds and older population has exceeded 10 million in 2024, accounting for a total population ratio of 20.2%, officially entering the “super-aged society”. At the same time, South Korea’s total fertility rate in 2024 was only 0.72-0.75, the number of newborns dropped to about 23.8 million throughout the year, the lowest level since recorded. The latest data from South Korea’s National Data Center this month showed that South Korea’s 20-29 year-old population has dropped to 630.2 million, or even less than the elderly population size. This has led to a steady rise in the proportion of elderly people, and the financial, medical and
Similar trends can be seen in the Asia-Pacific region. South Korea’s Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs and Planning and Finance Officer Zhu Jue said on 22nd that population growth in the Asia-Pacific region has been slowing over the past 30 years and the overall population is expected to decline from 2035. The United Nations Asia-Pacific Economic and Social Commission (ESCAP) data for 2024 showed that the share of people aged 60 and over in the Asia-Pacific region is 15.1% of the total population and is expected to reach approximately 1/4 by 2050. Zhu Jue believes that in order to address this change, we need more than ever to cultivate a new growth momentum through structural reforms to sustainable prosperity.
Yuan Xin, a professor at the School of Economics at Nankai University and director of the Center for Aging Development Strategy Research at Nankai University, said in an interview with a reporter from the Global Times that"Demographic structure change" is a dynamic concept. Its connotation not only covers the downward trend of fertility, but also involves multiple long-term trends such as deepening population aging, extension of average life expectancy, changes in the proportion of working-age population, and increase in years of education.Understanding demographic changes requires clarifying two key concepts: "population opportunities" in the demographic sense and "population dividends" in the economic sense.The different stages of development will bring different types of demographic opportunities to the country, and the core of promoting socio-economic development is to transform opportunities into dividends through effective institutional design and policy guidance.
From Yuanxin's perspective, changes in population structure essentially reflect the profound transformation of population development from scale-driven to quality improvement, from a young structure to a long-lived society, and from a single form to a diverse form. Faced with this trend, we should proactively adapt to this change by implementing the employment-first strategy, promoting progressive reforms to delay the legal retirement age, and encouraging the elderly to participate in the silver economy.
Xiang Haoyu, a distinguished researcher at the Asia-Pacific Institute of China Institute of International Studies, told a Global Times reporter that from the perspective of industry and labor, changes in the population structure of the Asia-Pacific region are bringing challenges, but they are also reshaping the regional economic pattern and development path. On the one hand, some industries are facing transformation pressures. For example, labor-intensive industries such as traditional manufacturing may gradually shift to areas with younger population structures; while industries such as maternal and infant products, education and training, and fast fashion, which are closely related to consumption by young people, their market growth space is expected to gradually narrow. On the other hand, scientific and technological application fields such as medical health, biomedicine, rehabilitation care, elderly tourism, pension finance, smart home, and assistive robots are ushering in broad development prospects. Changes in the labor force structure will also stimulate enterprises 'rigid demand for automation and intelligent technology, promote the widespread application of industrial robots, artificial intelligence and related automated processes, and accelerate the transformation of the industry towards intelligence and unmanned.
WHO: Countries need to ensure they can adapt to change
Demographic transformation is not an issue of the times faced by the Asia-Pacific alone. The World Health Organization published an article earlier this month stating that countries around the world are facing major challenges in demographic transformation and need to ensure that their medical and social systems can fully adapt to such changes. In 2020, the number of people aged 60 and above in the world has exceeded the number of children under the age of 5. Between 2015 and 2050, the proportion of the global population over 60 years old will double from 12% to 22%. The United Nations General Assembly has designated 2021 - 2030 as the United Nations Decade of Healthy Aging. This global collaborative plan aims to bring together the efforts of various countries to achieve a longer and healthier life for mankind through a decade of collaborative, catalytic and cooperative actions. Vision.
In concrete measures, many countries have introduced policies to boost fertility rates. For example, the recent population indicators in South Korea have rarely “heated up”. The statistics of the South Korean Bureau of Statistics show that the population born in South Korea in the first half of this year exceeded 120,000, an increase of 7.4%, the highest increase in the same period in history. This trend is closely related to the policy “combination kick” put forward by the central and local governments, including providing integrated long-term subsidies, improving emergency care, child care and other “shroud support”, providing public welfare wedding venues or low-cost housing in various regions.
Against the background that many European countries continue to face low fertility rates, Spain's population data releases positive signals. According to data from Spain's National Statistics Institute, the number of births in the country will increase by 0.4% year-on-year in 2024, reaching 322,000, achieving the first positive growth in a decade. This positive change is closely related to a series of family support policies implemented by the Spanish government in recent years: on the one hand, by expanding inclusive childcare services and providing targeted childcare subsidies, the financial burden of families can be effectively reduced; On the other hand, the Labor Law clearly guarantees the flexible working right of employees with minor children. According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Spain has extended the unique and non-transferable parental leave for both parents from 16 weeks to 19 weeks, and stipulated that the first week of the new leave must be used within one year after the child is born or adopted.
Coping with the aging of the population and developing the silver-haired economy have also received widespread attention. The release of the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing in 2002 marked a key turning point when the world began to "build a society for all ages". Taking the European Union as an example, the European Commission began to systematically pay attention to the issue of silver-haired economy around 2015, proposing that "aging brings financial burden, but also an economic potential, and the silver-haired economy can become a new engine of growth and employment in Europe". In 2019, the proportion of people over 65 years old in the EU was 20.6%, and the analysis believes that by 2050, this figure will exceed 30%.
The EU has taken a series of measures at the alliance level. First, promote relevant policy research.The European Union released the Silver Economy Report in 2018 and held a policy recommendation seminar on the theme of "developing the European Union's Silver Economy".Second, support cross-border projects and exchange of experience networks within the region.For example, the EU supports the European Regional Economic Network (SEN@ER) joint initiative launched by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to promote the development and promotion of innovative products and services for new ageing markets, thereby fostering regional development and job creation.Third, financial support is provided to Member States through regional cooperation instruments.For example, as part of a broader resilience plan, the European Commission has set up the Resilience and Resilience Programme Fund, a portion of which will be approved to support improvements in the most vulnerable regions of the Member States, including improvements in the capacity of health services, housing and infrastructure, and long-term care.
The two major issues may seem independent, but in fact complement each other
In an interview with the Global Times in South Korea, South Korea’s Vice-Chairman of the Executive Committee of the City of Uzbekistan, Shinzo Abe, said that the APEC meeting for the first time listed “artificial intelligence” and “dealing with demographic changes” as key topics with a profound significance. These two major topics seem independent and complement each other: artificial intelligence technology provides solutions to mitigate labor shortages, while demographic changes have created a broad scenario for artificial intelligence applications. The joint inclusion of the two in the regional dialogue framework helps to promote cooperative consensus in the use of scientific and technological tools to address demographic challenges.
Yuan Xin told the Global Times reporter that demographic change is a common trend faced by the Asia-Pacific region, and this similarity has laid an important foundation for regional cooperation. Countries can see this trend as an opportunity to drive innovation, improve governance and cultivate new industries.
In recent years, China's practice in responding to demographic changes has provided useful references for relevant cooperation in Asia-Pacific countries. specifically expressed in three aspects: first, through the development of older people's education, the promotion of older volunteer services, the establishment of public participation positions in the community, actively create the social atmosphere of "old people"; second, follow the principle of small-stage adjustment, flexible implementation, classification and coordination, orderly explore the gradual delay of the legal retirement age reform, transform the demographic pressure brought by the long-lived society into human capital advantages; third, vigorously foster the silver economy, promote rehabilitation services, adapt the aging living environment, rehabilitation and smart health management.
“At present, countries in the Asia-Pacific region are generally facing challenges from demographic changes, but there are also differences in the stages in which different economies are situated,” Hui said in an interview with the Global Times reporter, analyzing that some economies are aging and minor, such as Japan and South Korea; some are rapidly entering aging societies; some demographic structures are still relatively young, but fertility has begun to decline, such as Vietnam and Indonesia; and some economies still enjoy marked “demographic dividends.”
Xiang Haoyu believes that diversity has always been an important force driving Asia-Pacific cooperation, and the differences in population structure among countries can be transformed into complementary advantages-through labor mobility, capital cooperation, technical exchange and experience sharing, we can jointly alleviate the impact of population transition.
[Global Times special correspondent to South Korea Xing Xiaojing Wang Cong Global Times reporter Lu Zenan Yan Huan Li Zhiyin Han Wen]