The main measures to reduce the working-age population include:
First, extending the retirement age to 65 is a common practice in many countries to cope with the aging population and reduce the pressure of social security expenditure, and it is time for China to adopt similar practices;
The second is to let migrant workers in cities and migrant workers between cities settle down. There are about 270 million migrant workers in cities in China, and there are nearly 1 100 million migrant workers in cities. Most of them don't have hukou. Generally speaking, migrant workers leave their jobs when men are 50 and women are 40, and gradually withdraw from the labor market. These people can generally extend their working life by 5- 10 if they can obtain a hukou.
The third is to make retired officials and scientific and technological personnel in the system play a better role. China's current system has strict restrictions on the re-employment of retired officials, especially senior retired officials, and they are not allowed to work in enterprises and other related institutions after retirement, resulting in many government elites with strong professional ability and accumulated professional experience, including some senior scientific and technological personnel in the system being idle and wasted. These measures seem reasonable from the perspective of anti-corruption, but the system design is too rough and simple. If the relevant system is refined and improved, allowing enterprises or relevant institutions to pay under certain conditions, rather than prohibiting it across the board, it can completely increase the supply of high-quality labor in China.
Fourth, on the basis of the policy that a couple can have two children, we should implement the policy of independent birth as soon as possible, and take measures to encourage young people to have more children when necessary, so as to reverse the imbalance of the national population structure brought about by the rapid aging of the population.
2. Improve the quality and quality of the labor force.
Another effective measure to deal with the decrease of labor force is to improve the quality of labor force and make up for the shortage with the improvement of quality. This requires strengthening investment in practical technical education and training, providing more workers with higher quality free technical training and technical education, and solving the structural employment problem through more professional technical training.
Schools should be given greater autonomy in running schools, and university education should provide targeted education and training services for technicians to meet the needs of industrial development and structural adjustment, strengthen the docking of professional courses with market demand, and alleviate the waste of talents caused by structural unemployment of college graduates.
It is necessary to advocate professionalism in an all-round way, reduce the utilitarian nature of education, truly cultivate personal professional interests, and form a culture of being the best able person in one's own profession.
Improve the social treatment and recognition of professionals and skilled workers in various fields, improve the social recognition of new professional farmers, and make experts and workers in different professional and technical positions become more respected and admired professionals.
3. Strengthen all-round scientific and technological innovation.
Judging from the scale of R&D investment and the number of patent applications, China is a big R&D country, and China is also a big country with a complete industrial system, but it is far from a strong country in terms of quality and core competitiveness.
From the perspective of innovation effect, although the number of patents in China is among the best, the transformation rate of scientific and technological achievements is only about 10%, far below the average level of 40% in developed countries.
From the perspective of industrial system, many of our products and services can not meet the needs of consumers for upgrading, diversification and refinement in quality. Many fields do not have the ability to compete with overseas advanced technologies, products and services, and some high-end products and core technologies cannot be independently developed and produced at all, so they must be highly dependent on imports.
In the free trade environment, it is not a problem to form a global industrial division system and industrial chain by exchanging needed goods and comparative advantages. In addition, China is also a country with a trade surplus.
Unfortunately, however, China still faces the high-tech blockade and embargo of western countries led by the United States on the pretext of national security, ideological differences, institutional differences and gaining competitive advantage, while the technology embargo led by the United States, which should not have appeared in this peacetime, is further strengthened.
Under the constraint of external pressure, any technology and industrial policy with expectations and illusions about the global industrial chain and technology chain is not easily accepted politically.
We must also continue to adopt the industrial policy of import substitution in key areas and strengthen domestic R&D and import substitution of core technologies and products, so as to get rid of our heavy dependence on imported products and technologies.
Since scientific and technological innovation and innovation-driven development are the top priorities of supply-side structural reform, it is necessary to further improve the innovation incentive system, strengthen the government's support for basic research, encourage enterprises to invest more resources in research and development, strengthen intellectual property protection and intellectual property incentives, and form a more open and inclusive innovation environment.
At the same time, we also need to strengthen international cooperation in industrial technology R&D and innovation, make better use of the best R&D resources in the world, form a more stimulating industrial technology innovation and R&D environment, and promote angel investment, venture capital and equity investment environment for the commercialization of R&D achievements.
4. Deepen all-round opening up.
China's rapid growth in the past benefited from opening to the outside world, and its future development is still inseparable from opening to the outside world. However, the future external international environment may bring many challenges to China.
These new challenges may require that our opening to the outside world should not be limited to the expansion and access of goods and services markets, but may also involve the integration of institutional mechanisms with the international community.
This is because China's more open economy requires China enterprises to participate more in international market competition and trade and investment exchanges, which involves fair competition based on rules between countries and consistency of legal protection for participants.
This may subvert some of our traditional habits in the past. For example, we used to say that it is the sovereignty of a country to formulate industrial policies, and no one can make irresponsible remarks.
This specious assertion may only be a manifestation of disrespect for international rules in the new environment, because when a country uses industrial policy tools, the policy tools used, especially government subsidies, are likely to violate the countervailing agreement of the World Trade Organization, which will make subsidized enterprises have an unfair trade competitive advantage compared with enterprises that do not accept similar subsidies.
Therefore, in an open environment, if international rules are respected, any country has the right to make irresponsible remarks about other countries' domestic policies that may distort trade based on international rules.
Therefore, from the perspective of industrial policy, in order to respect international rules and improve the actual effect of policy means, we need to give better play to the incentive function of competition mechanism to market players, rather than simply supporting it with government subsidies, and avoid leaving excuses for other countries to take trade protection measures or countervailing and anti-dumping measures.
In the service field, it is necessary to further open the service industry, promote high-level competition in the domestic service market by introducing advanced and high-quality foreign service models, and improve the service quality and service capacity of the domestic service industry as soon as possible through competition.
In terms of urban open development, China needs to accelerate the all-round opening of coastal urban agglomerations and important metropolitan areas, especially to improve the international business environment of first-tier cities and quasi-first-tier cities, so as to better attract foreign innovative resources and high-quality enterprises to participate in the development of China and cultivate several real international metropolises.
5. Optimize the energy structure and strengthen energy conservation.
Energy is the fuel of modern economic growth engine, and energy revolution and innovation are very important for China's security and sustainable development. China is a big energy consuming country, but the per capita energy resource endowment is obviously insufficient.
At present, China's per capita energy consumption is about 3 tons of standard coal, which is far from that of the United States 1 1 ton standard coal and Russia 13 ton standard coal, and only half of that of Japan and Germany, which have the highest energy utilization efficiency.
With the improvement of residents' per capita income level, consumption behavior will further converge to that of residents in developed countries, and the per capita energy consumption level will also converge.