World At Net · Global Economy · October 2026
Ageing societies are advertising jobs that nobody applies for, while young societies are producing graduates faster than their economies can employ them. Migration, skills and automation sit uneasily in between.
Imagine two job fairs held on the same weekend. In a convention hall outside Osaka, hospital recruiters and factory managers hand out brochures to a thin trickle of visitors, offering bonuses and flexible hours for roles they have advertised for months. In a stadium on the edge of Lagos, or Lahore, or Nairobi, tens of thousands of graduates queue for a few hundred openings, clutching folders of certificates. Neither scene is a single real event, but both are real in spirit, and together they describe one of the defining facts of the twenty first century. The world is not short of people, and it is not short of work. It is short of a way to bring the two together.
The United Nations expects world population to keep growing for another half century or so, peaking at around 10.3 billion people in the mid 2080s, up from 8.2 billion in 2024. Global fertility has fallen from 3.3 births per woman in 1990 to 2.3 today, and more than half of all countries now sit below the 2.1 needed to hold a population steady without migration. Yet the same UN analysis notes that in roughly 100 countries the working age population will keep expanding through 2054. Averages hide a divide. Some countries are shrinking and greying so quickly that employers cannot find staff. Others are young, fast growing and crowded with job seekers for whom formal work simply does not exist. This article compares the two worlds, looks at what connects them, and asks why moving people to where the work is turns out to be so much harder than it sounds.
Begin with the ageing side of the ledger, because it is where the arithmetic is starkest. Japan has the oldest population of any large country. Government data show that people aged 65 and over number about 36.25 million, or 29.3 percent of the population, and demographic analysts estimate that the labour force could shrink from about 69.3 million in 2023 to roughly 49.1 million by 2050 if historical patterns hold. A survey by Teikoku Databank found that 51 percent of Japanese companies report a shortage of full time employees. Oxford Economics argues that Japan’s labour force will start shrinking whatever happens, because rising participation and foreign workers cannot offset the fall in the working age population, and because the pool of people outside the labour force who would like to work has halved over the past decade. The easy reserves, in other words, have already been used.
Japan’s response has been to open the door, slowly and with visible discomfort. The number of foreign workers reached more than 2.57 million at the end of October 2025, up 11.7 percent in a year and equal to 4.1 percent of everyone employed. Vietnam supplies the largest group, at nearly 606,000, followed by China, and healthcare and welfare services employ the largest single share. By the end of June 2026, the number of foreign residents had climbed to a record 4.28 million, about 3.5 percent of the population, according to figures reported by AFP. The immigration expert Toshihiro Menju told AFP that with the population falling by more than 900,000 a year, Japan has no choice but to rely on foreign workers. Yet the same month, the government tightened the rules for permanent residency, demanding higher incomes and better Japanese. The country needs workers and is wary of settlers, a tension that will define its politics for decades.
South Korea shows what happens when fertility collapses further still. Its total fertility rate hit a world low of 0.72 in 2023, and although it has since recovered to 0.80 in 2025, with births up 6.8 percent to 254,457, deaths of 363,389 still outnumbered births for the sixth year in a row. The central bank estimates that potential annual growth has fallen by six percentage points over three decades and could slide to 0.6 percent by the late 2040s. The government projects a population of 51.8 million shrinking by almost a third to 36.2 million by 2072. A small rebound is welcome news, but a rise from a very low base does not change the age structure of a society that is already grey.
China matters most because of its scale. Official data show that the population fell by 3.39 million in 2025 to about 1.405 billion, the fourth annual decline in a row. Births dropped to 7.92 million, down 17 percent on 2024, while deaths rose to 11.31 million. People aged 60 and over now number 323 million, or 23 percent of the population. The core working age group of 16 to 59 stands at 851 million, but it shrank by about 6.6 million in a single year, according to Asia Times, and the northeast has returned to population levels last seen in the 1980s. Reuters reported that demographers see a pension system and a plan to lift domestic consumption both strained by a shrinking and ageing workforce. Here lies a paradox worth noting: China has a labour shortage in the long run and a graduate jobs problem in the short run, because the economy is changing faster than the population.
Europe sits closer to the middle. Eurostat projections reported by Ecofin suggest that the European Union’s population will peak at 453.3 million this year before declining to 419.5 million by 2100. The hiring pain is already visible. ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Talent Shortage Survey, which covered 39,000 employers in 41 countries, found that 72 percent report difficulty filling roles, down slightly from 74 percent a year earlier. The figure was 83 percent in Germany, 74 percent in France and 69 percent in Britain. Euronews reported that Slovakia topped the European list at 87 percent, followed by Greece and Japan at 84 percent. China, at 48 percent, was the least constrained of the large markets.
These numbers deserve a careful reading, because a talent shortage is not always a shortage of people. In 2026, for the first time, AI skills topped the global list of what employers find hardest to hire, with AI model and application development named by 20 percent of firms and AI literacy by 19 percent. Surveys of this kind capture mismatches as much as headcounts. A country can have unemployed graduates and unfilled vacancies at the same time, which is exactly what is happening in much of the world. The shortage is real, but it is a shortage of particular skills, in particular places, at particular wages.
Now turn to the other side of the divide. The International Labour Organization’s Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026 report finds that global youth unemployment rose from 12.3 percent in 2024 to 12.4 percent in 2025, equal to 67 million unemployed people aged 15 to 24. The share of young people not in employment, education or training, known as the NEET rate, edged up to 20 percent, which is more than 257 million people and 9 million more than in 2023. Young people are now 3.43 times as likely as adults to be unemployed. The ILO expects the youth unemployment rate to hold at about 12.3 percent in 2026 and 2027, but its officials warned that when unemployment and NEET rates rise together, a red flag is justified.
The gender gap inside these figures is severe. The NEET rate for young women stands at 27.4 percent, more than double the 13.1 percent for young men, according to a summary of the report, and women make up over two thirds of all NEET youth, largely because of unpaid care work, weak childcare and discrimination, especially in Southern Asia, North Africa and the Arab States. Regionally, the Arab States and Northern Africa recorded the world’s highest youth unemployment rates in 2025, at 26.2 percent and 22.6 percent, and in both regions at least one in three young people was NEET. Notably, some of the sharpest recent increases were in richer economies. In Northern America, youth unemployment rose from 8.3 percent in 2023 to 9.8 percent in 2025, a reminder that the problem of young people locked out of work is not confined to poor countries.
Sub Saharan Africa is where the scale of the challenge becomes almost overwhelming. According to the World Bank, the region’s working age population will grow by about 740 million people by 2050, the largest expansion anywhere. Up to 12 million young people could enter the labour market each year, while the region currently creates only about 3 million formal salaried jobs annually, as Ecofin summarised from World Bank analysis. The Mastercard Foundation’s Africa Youth Employment Outlook 2026 estimates that sub Saharan Africa will need about 15 million new jobs a year by 2030, reported the Standard in Kenya. Kenya’s own statistics bureau recorded 848,200 jobs created in 2023, of which 85 percent were informal. Uganda’s Economic Policy Research Centre estimates that nearly nine million young Africans a year end up in low productivity informal work such as street vending, food delivery and gig tasks.
It is important to describe this accurately. Africa does not have a youth laziness problem or even, in many places, a youth unemployment problem in the narrow statistical sense, since young people who cannot afford to wait take whatever work exists. The deeper trouble is the shortage of decent, productive jobs, which means that headline unemployment can look moderate while underemployment and poverty wages are widespread. Growth alone has not solved it. Even where economies expand by five or six percent a year, formal job creation has lagged far behind the number of new entrants.
Pakistan sits in the middle of this picture, as a country with a large and growing youth cohort and a labour market that has struggled to absorb it. Analysis in Business Recorder, drawing on World Bank research, argues that Pakistan needs to create between 2.5 million and 3 million jobs every year for the next decade, a total of 25 to 30 million, simply to keep pace with demography. The labour force is growing by roughly 2.2 to 2.5 million people a year, and meeting the target would require nearly doubling the historical rate at which the economy absorbs workers. For comparison, the same analysis notes that India adds roughly 7 to 8 million jobs annually, supported by growth above 6 percent, while Vietnam transformed its labour market by joining global value chains and building industrial clusters.
The latest data are sobering. Dawn reported, in an editorial carried by the Asia News Network, that Pakistan’s unemployment rate rose to 7.1 percent in the 2024 25 fiscal year, the highest level in 21 years, with the labour force growing by about 3 percent a year and growth of at least 5 percent needed to prevent further deterioration. Estimates of youth unemployment vary by survey, from around 11 percent to nearly 13 percent for the 15 to 24 age group. Commentary from UKFIET notes that the unemployed population rose from around 4.5 million in 2020 to 21 to nearly 5.9 million in 2024 to 25, and that graduates form a rising share of the jobless, which points to a mismatch between education and what employers want. Many of those who can leave do so. Some estimates put emigration for work at about 860,000 people in a recent year, most of them under 35.
That brings the story full circle. Pakistan’s young graduates, Nigeria’s young engineers and the Philippines’ young nurses are in effect the supply that Japan, Germany and the Gulf states are searching for. On paper, the two halves of the divide ought to fit together like pieces of a puzzle. In practice they rarely do, and understanding why is the heart of the matter.
Two demographic worlds, side by side
| Feature | Ageing and shrinking societies | Young and growing societies |
|---|---|---|
| Typical examples | Japan, South Korea, China, much of Europe | Sub Saharan Africa, Pakistan, parts of the Arab world |
| Core problem | Too few working age people to fill vacancies and fund pensions | Too few formal jobs for a rapidly growing workforce |
| Key figure | China: 851 million aged 16 to 59, down about 6.6 million in a year | Africa: up to 12 million entrants a year versus about 3 million formal jobs |
| Employer view | 72% of firms worldwide report hiring difficulty; 83% in Germany | Informal work absorbs most young people; graduates struggle to find formal roles |
| Political tension | Need for workers versus fear of immigration | Need for jobs versus pressure to emigrate |
The natural answer is migration, and the numbers show that it is already happening on a large scale. The OECD’s International Migration Outlook 2025 recorded 6.2 million new permanent immigrants across OECD countries in 2024, 4 percent fewer than the year before but still 15 percent above 2019. The OECD’s secretary general said that migration flows help address labour shortages and support the resilience of OECD economies. The health sector shows how deep the dependence runs: in 2020 to 2021, 22 percent of doctors and 17 percent of nurses in OECD countries were foreign born.
Look closer, though, and the picture is less reassuring. Labour migration fell by 21 percent in 2024, even as humanitarian arrivals grew and a record 3.1 million asylum seekers registered across the OECD. Permanent migration dropped 41 percent in the United Kingdom, 12 percent in Germany and 16 percent in Italy, while it rose 20 percent in the United States, driven by humanitarian flows. In other words, the share of migration that is organised around labour needs is shrinking at precisely the moment when ageing societies most need it, while the share driven by family reunification and humanitarian protection is rising. Governments in Europe and elsewhere are tightening rules for political reasons, and the results are visible in lower labour inflows even where employers are begging for staff. The OECD also reports that international student numbers fell 13 percent as Australia, Canada and Britain imposed restrictions, closing one of the most important pathways through which skilled workers once arrived.
Why is it so hard to match supply and demand? Part of the answer is skills and certification. The OECD notes that migration policy is increasingly tailored to talent attraction, but recognition and licensing remain major barriers for migrant health professionals, so a trained nurse from one country may be unable to practise in another for years. Language is another barrier, as Japan’s tightened residency rules illustrate. Housing, integration support and social acceptance matter too. Where public opinion turns against newcomers, governments respond, regardless of what employer surveys say. The people who are available are not always the people who are needed, and the people who are needed are not always welcome.
There is also an ethical dimension that rarely appears in recruitment brochures. When rich countries hire nurses, doctors and engineers from poorer ones, they draw down human capital that those countries paid to train and still urgently need. The OECD itself highlights the international migration of health professionals as a special concern. Some arrangements are designed to be mutually beneficial, such as the European Union’s Talent Partnerships, which aim to organise labour mobility so that both origin and host countries gain, but they remain small compared with the scale of the need. For a country like Pakistan, the question is whether emigration works as a safety valve that brings home remittances and skills, or as a drain that leaves hospitals and classrooms short. Both can be true at once.
A third force complicates everything: technology. If ageing countries cannot find enough workers, automation looks like an obvious answer, and Japan in particular has leaned into robotics and assistive technology. WorldAtNet has examined this wider shift in The End of Work as We Know It?, which looks at how automation is redefining careers, and in The Next Industrial Revolution, a flagship report on the technologies expected to reshape economies by 2040. For ageing economies, machines that lift, sort, scan and answer calls can fill gaps that people cannot. Japan’s exoskeletons, warehouse robots and automated checkouts are early examples of what a shrinking workforce makes economically rational.
For young economies, the same technology is a source of anxiety. The ILO estimates that 6.1 percent of jobs held by people aged 15 to 29 are highly exposed to AI driven task replacement, a modest share, but concentrated in the entry level office work that educated young people have traditionally used to start careers. Officials were careful to say that it is too soon to draw firm conclusions about whether AI is raising youth unemployment. Still, it is hard to ignore that some of the steepest recent increases in youth joblessness have come in higher income economies where AI adoption is fastest. Developing countries that hoped to climb the ladder through business process outsourcing and routine digital services may find the lower rungs being removed before they can step onto them.
This produces an uncomfortable asymmetry. Ageing countries want automation to substitute for missing workers, while young countries need labour intensive growth to employ the workers they have. If robots build the cars and AI answers the phones, the traditional development path, in which a poor country uses cheap labour to manufacture and serve richer ones, narrows. That is why economists argue that agriculture, food processing, construction, care work, renewable energy and tourism, where human presence still matters, deserve more attention as engines of mass employment. The Business Recorder analysis for Pakistan makes a similar point, arguing that agri value chains, storage, processing and exports can absorb large numbers of young workers, but only if land, water and market reforms are pursued seriously.
Climate adds another layer of risk, especially for the young economies that depend on farming. WorldAtNet’s analysis in The Heat That Cannot Wait discusses how a strengthening El Niño could weaken the Indian monsoon and threaten crop production across South Asia, among other effects. Farm jobs are the largest source of employment in many low income countries, so bad harvests do not just raise food prices. They also push workers off the land and towards cities and borders. In a world that is already short of formal employment, climate shocks can turn a slow jobs problem into a sudden migration pressure.
Ageing societies, for their part, are discovering that keeping older people in work is one of the cheapest sources of labour available, and that it depends heavily on health. Japan’s older workers, and increasingly those in Europe and East Asia, stay in jobs into their late sixties and seventies, which makes questions of strength, mobility and healthy ageing economic as well as personal. WorldAtNet’s piece on why protein supplements do not build muscle in older adults belongs to this larger conversation, because a workforce that is older needs to be physically capable for longer. A longer working life only helps if it is a healthy one.
If the divide is real, what can be done about it? The evidence points towards a combination of measures rather than a single solution, and the strategies for the two sides of the divide differ.
For ageing countries, the first priority is to widen participation. Women, older workers and people with disabilities are the largest untapped reserves, and what holds them back is usually practical: childcare, flexible hours, retraining, pension rules and workplace design. Japan and South Korea have both moved in this direction, yet Oxford Economics warns that participation among young and middle aged citizens is already stretched. The second priority is productivity, using automation, better management and digital tools to produce more with fewer people. The third is immigration, designed deliberately rather than reluctantly, with clear pathways, language training, recognition of foreign qualifications and a serious plan for integration. Countries that treat migrants as temporary inconveniences tend to get the worst of both worlds, short term labour without long term belonging.
For young countries, the task is to create jobs at scale, and the lessons from economies that managed it are consistent. Vietnam, Bangladesh, Morocco and Jordan are often cited in Pakistani policy debate for cutting youth unemployment through incentives for labour intensive industry, large apprenticeship systems that link employers and training providers, and export diversification. Reforming education so that graduates leave with skills that firms want matters as much as the number of degrees awarded. Making it easier to formalise small businesses, widening access to credit for young entrepreneurs, investing in power and logistics so that factories can operate, and supporting women’s participation all expand the number of jobs that actually exist. None of this is quick. Pakistan spends less than one percent of GDP on education, according to commentary cited in Pakistani media, and a country cannot build a skilled workforce on that foundation.
For both sides, the most promising idea is managed mobility, which means agreements between countries that match training, recruitment and return or settlement in ways that benefit everyone involved. Under such arrangements, a health worker is trained to a standard recognised in both countries, recruited with an agreed contract, and supported both abroad and at home, perhaps with the host country co financing training capacity in the origin country. Done badly, it becomes poaching. Done well, it becomes a rare example of a win for sending countries, receiving countries and the workers themselves. The evidence so far shows only a few small examples, which suggests that the political will to scale them has lagged behind the economic logic.
The deeper lesson is that demography is not destiny, because outcomes depend on policy. A young population is a dividend only if it is educated, healthy and employed. An old population is a burden only if it is excluded, unproductive and unsupported. Japan’s worker shortage and Africa’s job shortage are two faces of the same failure to match people with opportunity, and each is worsened when the other is ignored. Rich countries that close their doors while complaining about labour shortages, and poor countries that celebrate their youth bulge without building jobs for it, are making the same mistake from opposite directions.
Time matters here as well. The UN notes that the working age population in many young countries will keep growing for decades, but in many countries the window in which a young age structure produces rapid growth is finite. As fertility falls, today’s young economies will age too, often before they have grown rich, a pattern that China has already shown on a vast scale. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and Nigeria are racing against that clock. The generation now entering the labour market will either be the engine that lifts these societies or the evidence of a missed opportunity. The same is true in ageing economies, where each year of delay in building childcare, retraining and integration systems makes the eventual adjustment harder.
It would be easy to end on pessimism, but the story has hopeful elements. South Korea’s birth rate has risen two years in a row, and its marriages jumped by double digits, which suggests that policy and culture can shift. Japan’s foreign workforce has grown rapidly despite political caution. Pakistan’s ports and logistics have demonstrated, in a different context, that the country can respond when conditions change quickly. And young people everywhere are adapting faster than institutions, moving into digital work, entrepreneurship and cross border employment that previous generations could not have imagined. What is missing is not talent or energy but the connective tissue: the training systems, the legal pathways, the investment and the trust that turn demographic facts into economic gains.
The world of the 2030s and 2040s will be shaped by whether that tissue gets built. If countries respond defensively, by walling off labour markets, ignoring unemployment and hoping that machines will solve everything, they will face a hard decade of shortages in some places and unrest in others. If they respond cooperatively, by training, matching and integrating, then the divide could become a partnership, with the surplus of young energy in one part of the world supplying the care, craft and creativity that older societies increasingly lack. The numbers do not decide which path is taken. People and governments do, and the choices are being made right now, in budgets, visa rules and classrooms.
Sources and currency. Figures draw on reporting and data from the United Nations Population Division, the International Labour Organization, the OECD, the World Bank as reported by Ecofin and others, ManpowerGroup, China’s National Bureau of Statistics as reported by Caixin and Reuters, South Korea’s Ministry of Data and Statistics, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and Immigration Services Agency, Oxford Economics, Eurostat, Business Recorder, Dawn and UKFIET. Where surveys differ, the article gives a range. Statistics reflect reporting available on 26 October 2026, and several are estimates that may be revised.
Note. This article is editorial analysis for general information. It is not employment, immigration, financial or legal advice.
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