郑风田：20年后中国面临的最大问题
郑风田 中国人民大学
20年后我国最大的麻烦将是老龄化的社会，目前中国的“未致富，先变老”令人堪忧。人口老龄化已经成为我国未来一个不容忽视的重大社会问题。
最近的国际机构与媒体纷纷对中国的老龄化社会进行了密度很高的关注，如：
据新华网的报道，高盛首席经济学家奥尼乐尔认为，中国真正的麻烦在未来20年，比如人口老龄化问题，社会财富的分配问题等。
今天出版的英国《经济学人》专门有一个专辑讨论老龄化社会问题，其中报道中国困境时讲我国是“未变富，先变老”，认为中国未来将面临严重的老龄化社会的挑战。
而据中国网6月26日的消息讲，日本《追求》双周刊6月24日文章称，中国将成为世界第一个步入“老龄社会”的发展中超级大国。
人口老龄化虽然是世界性的问题，但对中国来讲，该问题未来将变得尤为突出。面对老龄化的到来，如何积极应对则成了一个当务之急的问题。
未变富，先变老？
老龄化的标准很多，最直接、最重要的一个标准，就是说60岁以上的人口占总人口10%以上，或者65岁以上的人口比率超过总人口的7%，就成为“老龄化社会”，而人口比率超过14%则被认为是“老龄社会”。中国按2005年统计，60岁以上的人口是1.44亿，占全国人口的11%，65岁以上达到了7.6%， 中国已经进入了老龄化社会。
虽然目前我国按年龄计划目前还是一个相对年轻的社会，平均年龄30岁，但这在发展中国家也够独特的了。我国目前人口变老的速度特别快，据预测，我国在2030年，60岁以上的老人口将增至4亿，等于现在欧盟15国的人口总和；至2050年，我国60岁和65岁以上的老龄人口总数将分别达到4.5亿和3.35亿，人口当中每3个人中就有1个老人。
到2050年，我国的人口平均年龄将达到45岁，从老龄化社会进入老龄社会，法国用了115年，英国用了47年，德国用了40年，而日本用了24年，速度惊人。根据联合国统计数据，我国将在2024年至2026年前后进入老龄社会，速度与日本大体相同。
我国的老龄化模式与日本、韩国、新加坡及我国的香港、台湾相似，但唯一的差异是，他们进入老龄化社会已很富了，我国却在很穷的状态下进入老龄化社会，这会带来严重的社会问题。
退休的终结？日本的代价值得借鉴。
最近英国的经济学人，有一个专辑，专门讲述人类进入老龄化社会的困境。其中的一个主题是以后人类将会由于人口的减少，面临退休的终结。也就是说，由于年青人少，许多岗位没人干，退休的老人只能重新返聘，来填补这些工作岗位。退休了，还得工作，也真够要命的。
去年在日本游览时，就发现这个现象特别明显。给我们开车的司机就是70多元，退休后返岗，一天开10多个小时车。老先生在我们进入大阪时，由于没有看清大角度转弯，结果让旅游车撞了一下，据说后来受到公司的严厉批评，被责令立即开车从大阪回到东京，也不能休息。想一想，那么一位70多岁的老人，不能颐养天年，出来工作，年纪大了，难免要出差，还要接受这样的处罚，也够不容易的了。
我国的计划生育政策推动和加速了社会老龄化进程，由于社会高速发展，疾病控制、卫生条件及生活水平的改善，出现"少生、少死、高寿"的现象，而退休的终结，可能让人虽然年纪大了，但更辛苦了。
4-2-1模式的忧虑。
长期的独生子女政策，使中国进入4-2-1模式，即是一个独生子女将要面临父母两人，爷爷奶奶姥姥姥爷四人的格式，随着生活条件的改善，人变得越来越长寿，这样下来，一个独生子女将要面临6个老人需要瞻养的问题，如果两个独生子女结婚，要面对12个老人需要瞻养的格局。这是一个可怕的现象，长期下来还不把未来的年轻人都会压跨？。 据一项研究测算，2000年我国每100个劳动年龄人口只需负担15.6个老年人，2050年则要负担48.5个老年人
中国还没有准备好，老龄化速度过快、社会养老压力加大 ，中国进入老龄化社会使未来我国的养老金缺口9.15万亿 。
据世界银行公布的一份关于中国未来养老金收支缺口的研究报告讲，按照目前的制度模式，2001年到2075年间，中国基本养老保险的收支缺口将高达9.15万亿元。
我国离退休金占GDP的比重，由1978年的0.5%提高到2002年的3.6%，1978年31个职工有一退休人员，2002年2.5个在岗职工中就有一个离退休人员，目前专家估算养老金缺口高达5万亿元左右; 致使社保基金不足，个人帐户空帐运行，给养老保险造成很大困难。
农村的养老更令人堪忧，目前我国农村的老人主要靠家庭养老，但大部分的青壮年外出打工，加大了农村老人的劳动负担，七八十岁的年纪还需劳动谋生，农村养老保险覆盖率很低，虽然中央今年提出在全国进行10%的试点，但要建立全国的养老体系，还有很长一段路要走。
空巢老人、高龄老人增长较快，老人服务和养老方式面临挑战等等都需要进行调整。
（评论者郑风田为中国人民大学教授）
阅读材料：
日刊称中国面临低收入阶段进入老龄化难题
2009-06-26 17:29:24 来源: 中国网
中国网6月26日讯 日本《追求》双周刊6月24日文章称，中国将成为世界第一个步入“老龄社会”的发展中超级大国。
作为世界经济火车头的中国，现在越来越面临着人口老龄化的问题。
通常，65岁以上的人口比率超过总人口的7%，就被称为“老龄化社会”，而超过了14%就被称为“老龄社会”。中国在2005年达到了7.6%。实际上中国在2001年就已开始进入了老龄化社会。
从老龄化社会进入老龄社会，法国用了115年，英国用了47年，德国经过了40年，而日本只用了24年，速度之快非常惊人。根据联合国的人口统计数据，中国将在2024年至2026年前后进入老龄社会，速度与日本大体相同。
造成这种状况的原因之一是中国实行了独生子女政策，导致了出生率的下降。当然，出生率下降不会马上与人口老龄化联系在一起。目前能够参与经济活动的15至65岁的“生产年龄人口”仍在增加。这一人口比率较高的国家，往往具有增长潜力。这就是所谓的“人口红利”。从普遍经验来看，如果对人口结构问题应对得当，充分利用人口红利就可以赶上发达国家，为此就需要建立一个能够吸纳年轻人的劳动力市场。日本在经济高速增长时期几乎实现了完全就业，最大限度地发挥了人口红利的作用。
那么，中国会怎样呢？从人口构成来看，人口红利期始于1965年至1970年。当时中国正处于社会主义建设高潮，由于生产效率低下，1965年至1978年的年均经济增长率只有3.9%。改革开放以来，中国经济高速增长，但劳动力人口将在2015年转为减少。日本的人口红利在上世纪90年代就已经结束，而中国也像韩国和台湾一样，预计在2015年左右结束。韩国和台湾的收入已经达到发达国家的水平，而中国的人均国内生产总值（GDP）尚不足4000美元。换言之，在中国成为发达国家之前，人口红利就将结束。
中国农村有很多的农民，他们实际上处于失业状态。他们作为农民工大量涌入城市，寻找工作。中国只要充分发挥农民工的作用，就可以延长和长期享受人口红利。上海和北京等城市的发展就归功于此。
但另一方面，人口红利期也有可能缩短。流入城市的多数是年轻人，大量老年人留在农村反而加速了农村的老龄化。此外，年轻人一般学历较高，而留在农村的老年人往往不具备农业以外的经验、知识和技术。今后，他们不可能像年轻的农民工一样寻找工作。如果那样的话，人口红利期又有可能缩短。
很多人期待上海和北京的繁荣能够波及到地方，形成“13亿人的大市场”。
上海人均GDP已经突破了1万美元，而广大的农村地区则是另外一种样子。老龄化的问题最先突出表现出来的不是出生率较低的城市，而是贫困的农村地区，而且农村社会保障体系并不健全。
中国所走的将是世界前所未有的“在低收入阶段进入老龄化”的道路。 (本文来源：中国网 作者：大泉启一郎)
A special report on ageing populations
China’s predicament
Jun 25th 2009 ECONOMIST
Getting old before getting rich
THE Beijing Ren Ai Geracomium is set in a drab, dusty village just outside the Chinese capital. Grouped round a pleasant garden, this old people’s home for about 80 residents, aged from 50 to 96, is unusual in several respects. Its private owner is a Christian, and the home has a small chapel where the handful of Christian residents, along with other people of that faith living in the area, gather for Sunday services. The home is run as a commercial enterprise, but Hu Wenru, its deputy director, says that since it opened three years ago it has been only gradually building up business and is not yet making a profit. Still, the owner is already preparing to launch a second one with 300 beds in the next village, so he must be confident of success.
The main thing that makes Ren Ai unusual is that it exists at all. Old people’s homes are a rarity in China, catering for only about 1% of the over-65s, far less than in most Western countries. The vast majority of older Chinese live with their families. Care for the old within the family is not only a cultural expectation, based on the Confucian tradition of respect for age and experience; under a law passed in 1996 it is also a legal obligation. Elderly people have been known to sue their families for maintenance if they fail to comply.
At present, institutional care is the last resort for those who have no family or who need so much help that their relatives cannot cope. Many of the residents at Ren Ai, for example, have serious physical or mental problems, and the home has two full-time doctors on the staff. The place is clean and seems well-run, but it is spartan: some of the rooms sleep six people, with one basic bathroom between them. Even so, the fees are much higher than most ordinary people can afford, averaging 1,300 yuan ($190) a month for the reasonably fit but with extra charges for those who want a single room or need lots of nursing. Some of the residents are subsidised by the government, which seems happy to let private initiative flourish.
There will be a lot more need for institutional care for elderly people in future, says Du Peng, director of the Institute of Gerontology at Beijing’s Renmin University. For the past three decades China has been operating a strict population-control policy, so there are now far fewer young people around to take care of the elderly. This state of affairs is usually referred to by the nifty formula “4-2-1”, meaning that the typical only child today will have two parents and four grandparents to look after—a bit of an exaggeration, but not that far off.
It has also become harder for families to live together because people move around a lot more than they used to. An estimated 150m migrant workers have left their rural homes for jobs in the big cities, though many of them might return home eventually. Most importantly, because of the low birth rate and rising life expectancy, the number of over-60s is expected to go up very rapidly, from about 166m now to 342m in only 20 years’ time. All this means, says Mr Du, that many more older folk will be living in institutions.
China is still a relatively young country, with a median age of around 30. But, uniquely among developing countries, it is ageing extraordinarily fast, so by 2050 its median age will have risen to about 45. Over the next few decades the ratio of elderly dependants to people of working age will rise steeply, from 10% now to 40% by 2050. From about 2030 the country will have more elderly dependants than children (see chart 8), whereas in most other developing countries the opposite will remain true for the next few decades. China’s pattern of ageing is very similar to that in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The difference is that in China this is happening at a time when the country is still relatively poor.
The man who lays claim to having invented the phrase “getting old before getting rich”, in the early 1980s, is Wu Cangping, an academic at the Population and Development Research Centre at Renmin University. At that time population ageing was receiving little attention, and he wanted to shock the government into preparing for it. Since then China has become a lot richer (with an income per person of about $6,000 at PPP)—though not nearly as rich as most developed countries when they were starting to age. Some Chinese demographers are now arguing that the phrase should be amended to “getting old while getting rich”.
Whether poor, rich or somewhere in-between, China will certainly need to spend some money to provide a basic social safety net for its people, not just the old but everyone. Until about 20 years ago the vast majority of urban workers were covered by a system known as the “iron rice bowl”. People who worked for the state, in state-owned companies or in state-approved collectives, enjoyed cradle-to-grave benefits ranging from housing, education and health care to a generous pension scheme, with an official retirement age of 55 for men and 50 for women for manual workers (but five years more for white-collar workers) and a replacement rate of about 80% of final salary. Most people retired about five years before the official age.
It was too good to last, and it didn’t. In the early 1990s huge number of state-owned enterprises were shut down and jobs in those that survived were savagely cut. Many state firms passed into private hands and new private companies grew up alongside them. Whereas civil servants and employees in state-owned firms used to make up nearly 80% of all urban workers, their share is now down to 20%. The government is committed to honouring the pension promises left over from the old system, but the iron rice bowl has gone. That has left a huge gap in urban workers’ social-security provision. Workers in rural areas, who still make up about half the total labour force, never had much coverage of any kind anyway.
Since then the government has launched a series of initiatives to put a new welfare system in place. The main concerns are health care and pensions. Since the demise of the old system, health-insurance coverage has been patchy and in rural areas mostly non-existent. Health insurance is generally not portable, so if people move from one part of the country to another they may lose their coverage. But even if covered, people have to make large co-payments, which for the elderly and those with serious health problems can be crippling. A survey carried out in 2000 by the China Research Centre on Ageing, a think-tank, found that more than half the over-60s’ medical expenses came out of their own pockets and a big chunk of the rest was paid for by their families.
In April the government set out its plan for a comprehensive reform to build a “safe, effective, convenient and affordable” health-care system by 2020. Over the next three years it intends to spend 850 billion yuan. By 2011 more than 90% of the population is meant to be covered by the system. In rural areas that figure has already been reached, but the scheme usually covers only in-patient treatment and the reimbursement rate remains very low.
The pensions system too is in flux. In the early 1990s the government announced a three-pillar scheme along the lines of those in many developed countries: a basic pay-as-you go pension to which both employers and employees make mandatory contributions; funded individual accounts, also with contributions from employers and workers; and individuals’ private savings. This is a work in progress. Reforms are being announced “almost annually”, says Wang Yanzhong, who heads the Centre of Labour and Social Security Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
So far only about a third of the population is covered by any kind of pension scheme. The funded individual accounts envisaged under the government’s plans have been set up, but so far there is little money in them. Because of restrictions on investment abroad and a dearth of high-yielding instruments at home, such money as has accumulated has been invested mainly in the domestic banking system, where it earns a rate of return far too low to meet the government’s pension promises.
Jonathan Anderson, a China specialist at UBS, calculates that under the current pension system the government could face unfunded liabilities of up to 6% of GDP annually a few decades hence. But it could head them off by a variety of means: raising contributions or increasing coverage to bring more money into the system; increasing the retirement age; securing better returns on the accumulated funds; or reducing future pay-outs.
By far the most effective way, though, would be to raise the retirement age. In early spring the government hinted that it was considering such a move, but Chen Chuanshu, vice-director of the government’s high-powered National Committee on Ageing, says there are “diverse views” on the matter. In principle it seems a good idea. Average life expectancy at birth, at 74, is now 25 years higher than it was 50 years ago, yet the retirement age has remained at the same low level. Unless it goes up, any comprehensive pension system that China might eventually introduce will be hideously expensive.
In practice, though, both workers and employers are strongly opposed to a change. Workers have got used to the idea of retiring in their 50s and planned their lives accordingly. Employers have had the luxury of being able to pick from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of vigorous people in their 20s and 30s. Workers in their 40s are already considered old, and many of those in their 50s may indeed lack the skills needed in a modern economy.
But given the low birth rate over the past 30 years, the supply of young workers is not, in fact, endless. Cai Fang, director of the Institute of Population and Labour Economics at CASS, points out that there is already a shortage of young migrant workers; it started in the coastal areas in 2004 and has now spread everywhere. The worldwide economic downturn has temporarily eased the pressure, but employers in China’s coastal boom belt continue to complain of shortages (although 20m people are said to have lost their jobs since the downturn hit late last year).
So there is now an economic, as well as a human-rights, case for relaxing the country’s “one-child policy”. Many Chinese academics think it can be only a matter of a few years, but the government seems in no hurry. “Family planning”, as it likes to call the policy, is seen as a success, easing pressures on the environment and resources of all kinds. There is no explicit population target, but the latest forecasts suggest that numbers will keep growing from about 1.3 billion now to a peak of around 1.46 billion by 2030 and then start declining gently.
In fact, even if the restrictions were loosened immediately the birth rate might not tick up by very much. In the big cities many people are already leading the sort of lives that have brought down fertility in richer countries.
China’s government is well aware of the problems of an ageing population, and “is doing all the right things but not always fast enough”, says Vanessa Wang, an Asia specialist and actuary with Mercer, a consultancy. So far the government’s main priority has been to keep up the prodigious economic growth rates of recent years, but the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has said that the government is attaching growing importance to social welfare.
Of the 4 trillion yuan economic-stimulus package announced last November, 300 billion has now been reallocated from infrastructure projects to welfare schemes. Critics say China could afford to do much better. Its public finances are in good shape, with its public debt at less than 20% of GDP and its fiscal balance improving rapidly. Saving, at over 40% of GDP, is high by international standards. Given the prospect of 440m pensioners by 2050, perhaps it should invest more in creating its much-advertised “harmonious society”.