What can countries do to counteract the impact of these demographic changes on their economic competitiveness?Recent newspaper headlines trumpeted stories of massive protests in Paris by students and workers denouncing pending labor market reforms; of teachers, policemen, and firefighters in Wisconsin protesting a bill that would truncate their collective bargaining rights; of marches by civil servants in Athens and London denouncing proposed cutbacks in their pensions and working conditions. Meanwhile, the Central Committee of the Communist Party announced new initiatives to promote economic development in China’s rural areas. Underlying each of these actions are dramatic demographic changes occurring in these countries.

Demography is the study of the structure of human populations—

their size, age composition, gender mix, growth, and so on. Demographers often assert that demography is destiny. By that they mean that a country’s demography constrains and shapes the opportunities available to it. If so, then changes in the population, age structure, and gender mix of the world’s major economies suggest that significant changes are in store for the world economy