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Projects


Ageing Workforces


Category: Demography and Economy


Who's involved?

The global labour market is being transformed. For several decades now, the richer older OECD nations have relied on young migrant labour to compensate for its old age dependency ratios. However, as fertility falls across Asia and Latin America, global ageing will intensify the world skills shortage and potentially create severe competition on the global labour market. It is thus essential that the countries look to the large skills base it has within its own economy, and retains, rather than cast out, experienced older workers in their fifties and sixties. Such a policy will also address that other major OECD concerns over increased spending on pensions, as people will work and contribute to the pension pot for longer and draw down for less time. This will also allow more of the public purse to be spent on the growing number of over 80s, who will need long term care. 

The Ageing Workforce Project continues to examining  key questions through our extensive evidence base collected using self-report surveys, interviews, observation, documentary and secondary data analyses. In particular how productive will these older workers be? How able are older men and women to retrain? Will their capacity to take on complex tasks decline with age? What role does age discrimination still play?