India has long been the second most populous country in the world.
China began to implement the family planning policy from 197 1, and it was made a national policy in 1982, and the population of China was gradually controlled.
According to United Nations data, in July 2022, the population of India was 65.438+0.40 billion, 654.38+0.710.70 billion, which was more than 8 million less than that of China. It is expected to surpass China next year.
When it comes to population, the first thing we think of is the labor force. Only when the population participates in the social division of labor can economic benefits be created. In terms of population structure, India's population is pyramid-shaped, with the population under 35 accounting for 60% of the total population, and the median age of the population is only 28 years old.
In India, there are young people everywhere, but the current situation is that the labor participation rate in India is very low, with an average of only four people working per 10. Among them, only 2 out of every 10 women are working. The attitude of many Indians towards work is that they would rather lie down and watch the sky than do coolies.
First of all, this is related to the quality of the Indian labor force. India's overall education level is very low, with 270 million illiterates. In India, people who can write their own names are not illiterate. These 270 million people can't even write their names. Some people say that the development of labor-intensive industries is manual labor and does not require cultural quality. But in fact, the low quality of workers will increase the cost of supervision and management and affect the efficiency of enterprises. When the efficiency is low to a certain extent, even if your labor is cheap, the enterprise will lose money.
Secondly, India's industrial structure is also a major reason for the low employment rate. To develop a society, there are usually two industrial shifts, that is, the primary industry shifts to the secondary industry and the secondary industry shifts to the tertiary industry. India, on the other hand, is developing directly from the primary industry to the tertiary industry.
India's first pillar industry is agriculture, and nearly 60% of the population is engaged in agriculture; The second pillar industry is the software industry, with 4 1 10,000 people engaged in the software industry. In Silicon Valley, 65,438+05% of the executives are Indians. India's secondary industry, the industrial base, is weak, with an output value of only 23% of GDP, while India's service industry accounts for more than 50%.
The biggest problem with such an economic structure is that if a country's economic development skips the secondary industry, it will not be able to absorb a large number of jobs, resulting in a wide gap between the rich and the poor, and ordinary people will have no money to spend in their pockets, which will not promote the prosperity of the market.
Take repairing a factory or a section of railway for example, raw materials such as steel, cement and chemicals are needed; Need to monitor, construction, supervision, finance, auditing and other positions to absorb a large number of jobs.
The situation in India is that Bangalore, known as the Silicon Valley of Asia, looks no different from the big cities in the United States, but it may be a slum separated by a wall, just like two worlds, busy and doing nothing.
Therefore, although India has a working-age population of 938 million, it has not achieved a "demographic dividend", so no one can farm. After all, the land carrying capacity is limited, and it will soon fall into the Malthusian trap.
India's current predicament tells us that economic prosperity is not about how rich the rich are in a country or how high the per capita wealth is. Instead, everyone in the country has a job, has a head start, and is willing to actively participate in the social division of labor and create value. The UAE is a rich country, but people will not say that the UAE economy is prosperous; China's per capita wealth is much lower than that of the United Arab Emirates, but in the past decades, China's economy has been very prosperous.
At present, the most urgent problem in India is how to speed up the industrialization process and increase the employment rate. While undertaking more low-end products OEM, we should also provide more skills training for workers and improve their quality.