The 2019 Japanese Presidency of the G20 has added demographics, population ageing in particular, to the list of global risks for discussion. The G20 timing could not be more pertinent: 2018 marked the first time in history that persons aged over 64 out-number children under-five; some 85% of global GDP now generated in countries that are home to newly rapidly ageing populations. The majority of countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, meantime, confront rapidly rising working-age population shares for whom jobs do not appear in the pipeline. The rest of this brief is structured as follows: Part 1 explains China’s contemporary experience of demographic dividend and development; Part 2 outlines the Chinese concept of ‘getting old before rich’ and its extrapolation into the Economic Demography Transition; Part 3 discusses the logic of China’s fears of ‘getting old before getting rich’; Part 4 draws lessons from China’s experience of the economic demography transition thus far for today’s “poor-young” countries; Part 5 offers concluding thoughts and calls for enhanced global dialogue and demographics-related experience sharing.
