Young blood becomes rarer

The amount of local physical labourers under the age of 35 could drop from 116,000 this year to 82,000 by 2031, according to data gathered for the Macau Population Forecast 2011 to 2036, released by the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), as reported by Chinese newspaper Macao Daily.
The future trend will lead to the restructuring of employment strategies for industries that normally hire local labourers – either to recruiting older employees or hiring more non-resident workers.
According to the director of Nankai University’s Institute of Population and Development, Chen Weimin, the amount of employed local residents in the city who received higher education had increased to 34.1 per cent in 2015 from 20.9 per cent in 2010, exceeding the percentage of that of non-resident workers.
The director also revealed that 11.7 per cent of local residents only received primary school education, compared to 7.7 per cent five years ago.
Meanwhile, the number of non-resident workers below the age of 35 increased from 31.4 per cent in 2010 to 37.3 per cent in 2015, data provided by director Chen shows.
Despite the rise in the number of younger workers in the employed population, workers over 55 accounted for 14.7 per cent of the entire employed population, up from 12.3 per cent in 2010, while local workers made up 19 per cent of the total employed population.
Local workers over the age of 45 accounted for 44 per cent of employed labourers in 2015.