Will you still need me?

ON FRIDAY, the National Bureau of Statistics announced that China's
working-age population shrank last year. In the slow-moving world
of demographics, that felt like a dramatic turning point: "peak
toil", if you like. The mobilisation of Chinese labour over the
past 35 years has shaken the world. Never before has the global
economy benefited from such a large addition of human energy.

And now the additions are over. The ending came rather sooner than
expected. The percentage of Chinese who are of working age started
falling in 2011.
But the number of working-age Chinese was expected to grow for a
few more years yet. As recently as 2005, official projections
suggested it would grow until the mid-2020s.

I'm not sure why demographers got it wrong. Predicting future rates
of longevity and especially fertility is undeniably hard. But
surely it isn't that difficult to figure out how many people aged
seven today will become 15 (and thus of working age) in eight
years' time. Therefore, it shouldn't be that hard to predict the
near future of the working-age population. Perhaps the difficulty
lies not with prediction so much as measurement. As I understand
it, the yearly estimates of China's population are based on an
annual national survey of about 1.5m people. Given the size of
China's population, it would be easy to miscalculate the numbers by
a few million here or there. Such errors could easily throw a
projection out by a few years.

Also worth bearing in mind is the definition of working age. In
last year's press
release, working age was defined as 15-64 years old. That is a
common age range used by the UN's Population Division and China's
own Statistical Yearbook. But for the purposes of Friday's press
conference, the NBS changed the definition, referring instead to
15-59 year olds. The number of Chinese in this age group declined
by 3.45m, it reported (see chart). But the number of people aged
15-64 seems to be increasing still. It rose to 1.004 billion in
2012 (I inferred this total based on other numbers provided in the
press conference).

There's nothing wrong with either age range. The 15-64 range
reflects common international practice and China's own past
definition. The 15-59 range is probably a better reflection of
China's economic reality, where men can retire from formal jobs at
60 and women often retire five or ten years earlier. (According to
the National
Transfer Accounts pioneered by Ronald Lee and
Andrew Mason, 60 is the age at which the average Chinese earns less
than he consumes, becoming, in effect, a dependant.)

But it's interesting that the NBS chose to rejig the definition of
working age for this press conference. One can only assume they
chose the 15-59 age group precisely because its numbers are already
declining. That allowed them to highlight a worrying demographic
trend. In response to a reporter's question, Ma Jiantang, the head
of the NBS, said he did not want the population figures to be lost
in the sea of data.

It is almost as if China's statisticians decided to set the clock a
few minutes fast to make sure China's policymakers have good time
to prepare for their impending demographic duties.

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