Migration and Population Aging: The Global Challenge

Abstract

This paper argues that not only do aging populations face the need for sufficient workers to provide them with public pensions; the elderly also need workers to service their needs. The likely source of these relatively unskilled workers is from migration from poorer countries, thus linking labour markets in a globalised world much more than might be expected from the experience of the Twentieth Century. These migrants will be ethnically different from the destinations populations, as occurred in the Nineteenth Century. The most import research challenge is to get as indication of the magnitude of the flows and therefore the degree of resulting ethnic heterogeneity.