China Center Chart Dive: Be Aware of China's Impending Retirement Surge

For most of the past four decades, China’s old-age dependency ratio was very low (>10 percent) and increasing quite slowly. A low level of retirees combined with the high availability of workers was an important driver of economic growth for China’s economy. However, the age-group composition of China’s population has reached a critical turning point: over the next 15 years, its old-age dependency ratio will double, and by 2040 it will have overtaken that of the United States and reached a level of “greyness” on par with high-income countries. The impacts of this rapid aging of the population will be numerous.