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Macroscope | How ageing Asia can keep its economic miracle going
- Asia needs to stop seeing older people as liabilities to be tolerated, and instead view them as assets to be nurtured, through better human resource management
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Asia is ageing quite rapidly with Japan leading the way, followed by South Korea and Thailand, and China and others not too far behind. Could this demographic shift presage the sunset of the Asian “economic miracle”?
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Anyone familiar with double-entry bookkeeping knows that every asset has a corresponding liability, and vice versa. But Asia sees its ageing people increasingly as a liability to be tolerated, rather than an asset to be nurtured.
So Asian countries are generally underusing their elderly – regarding them as redundant assets rather than pools of potential capable of contributing to national growth, while remaining healthier and happier in the process.
These were among my conclusions from moderating a recent expert panel discussion on population ageing and decline at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ) in Tokyo.
Intra-regional competition is becoming fiercer in Asia as countries fight for market share in a global economy threatened by politically driven fragmentation and contraction, supply chain rivalry and trade protectionism.
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Raising productivity to boost competitiveness is becoming an obsession and the assets being prioritised are physical ones associated with information technology and artificial intelligence, rather than human ones.
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