The retirement age has not been raised for decades and is among the lowest in the world. The low birth rate could cause serious problems for the economy, the health system and social protection.
China to gradually raise legal retirement agethe official Xinhua news agency announced on Friday, an unprecedented measure in decades in the second most populous country in the world that is facing a serious demographic crisis.
China’s population will decline for the second consecutive year in 2023which portends serious problems for the economy, the health system and social protection. Hundreds of millions of people are expected to reach old age in the coming decades in China, while the birth rate will drop dramatically.
The retirement age is one of the lowest in the world
The retirement age has not been raised for decades in the country and is among the lowest in the world. The new measure will raise the legal retirement age for men gradually to the 63 years old, compared to the current 60. In the case of the women will be raised from 50 to 55 years, or from 55 to 58 depending on the type of work performedXinhua news agency reported, citing a government decision. This increase will be gradual over 15 years starting in 2025.the same source said.
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From 2030 onwards the minimum years of work required to be entitled to a retirement pension will happen from 15 to 20 yearsat a rate of six additional months each year, according to the agency. This will allow employees to “delay their retirement to a later date if they reach an agreement with their employers,” it stressed. The measure was based on a “comprehensive assessment of average life expectancy, health conditions, population structure, educational level and labor supply in China,” the state agency specified.
He “demographic change” It was probably the key factor behind this decisionLi Changan, a labor economist at the Beijing University of International Business and Economics, told AFP.
“The central government first proposed changing the retirement age in 2013, and there have been many social debates in the past decade,” he explained. Before the announcement from Friday, The state press has already prepared the population with the publication of articles praising the merits of working longer hours. “This reform will adapt to the objective situation of the general increase in life expectancy and the number of years of education in our country,” said an article in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, this week. It will also “increase the effectiveness of development and the utilization of human resources,” it added.
Raising the retirement age “is a inevitable decision so that our country adapts to the new normal “population development,” Mo Rong, director of the Chinese Academy of Labor and Social Security, told the newspaper. This change “will lead to stabilizing the labor market participation rate [y] to maintain the momentum and vitality of economic and social development“, he said.
Repercussions
Chinese internet users flooded social media with comments about the announcement.. Hashtags on the topic on the Weibo platform accumulated more than 200 million visits in less than an hour.
But the Government censors appeared to remove many posts from the sitea common occurrence in a country where open discussions about national politics are often considered sensitive. Many of the responses to the announcement on Friday afternoon simply said: “Understood” or “It’s official”. But some indirectly commented on his dismay at the decision. “As long as we still have the choice to retire or not, I have no objections,” one user joked. Others lamented a lack of clarity about how much longer those born in the 1990s and 2000s would have to work compared to previous generations.
Source: Ambito
