China's migrant workforce, one of the main pillars of its massive economic growth, continued its declining trend reaching 277.5 million last year as the Communist giant faced demographic crisis due to rapid rise in old age population and decrease in wages.
The migrant labour population reached 277.5 million last year, an annual rise of 1.3 per cent but the year-on-year growth rate has been decreasing since 2011, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a report yesterday.
The growth rate dropped 0.6 per cent in 2015, and the percentage of workers younger than 40 years dropped 1.3 per cent to 55.2 per cent.
The average age is 38.6, about four months older than in 2014. The slower growth of the migrant-worker population might be a result of the slower growth of income.
According to the report, the average monthly salary reached 3,072 yuan (USD 472), while the annual growth rate dropped 2.6 points to 7.6 per cent, state-run China Daily reported today.
In the manufacturing sector, the growth rate dropped to 6.7 per cent, the rate in the construction industry dropped to 4.4 per cent.
Chinese officials hope the labour situation will improve as morepeople are expected to move into cities due to continued urbanisation.
The National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) said last year that over 230 million Chinese will move out of the countryside to live in cities by 2030.
Results of a study last month said China will face severe demographic challenges in the next 25 years as its working-age population is predicted to shrink to 56.9 per cent of the total population by 2030.
The ageing population will swell from 16.1 to 25.2 per cent which could seriously test China's social and economic development, a new data provided by the Population and Development Studies Centre at the Renmin University of China said.
The number of those aged between 16 and 59 will decrease to 896 million in 2020 and 824 million in 2030, while those aged 60 and over will grow to 253 million in 2020 and 365 million in 2030.
In a bid to shore up the numbers of the younger population,China this year has ended the three decades old one child policy and replaced it with two child as the demographic crisis deepened with sharp rise in the population of old age population.
