Labour quality can trump quantity

Availability of industrial labour is less of a challenge than widely believed. Parents with fewer children have healthier and more educated ones

In the Tessellatum last month, we discussed the first major finding from our project assessing the impact of Asia’s ageing on the global supply of workers and savings, and on global economic growth: That demographic shift in 10 major Asian economies (the A-10: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, and Taiwan) is faster than the economic transition. Here we discuss the second major finding — that workforce quality is likely to trump quantity, at least for the next decade.

The A-10 countries, which dominate global trade in manufactured goods, were half of incremental global workers till 2010,