南方财经全媒体记者 杨雨莱 上海报道
In the face of escalating global division and uncertainty, the 54th World Economic Forum (WEF) kicked off its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan 15th. With the theme of "Rebuilding Trust", the forum aims at enhancing cooperation and cultivating partnerships over the countries. The forum has assembled leaders from all over the world for a week of dialogues to discuss ways to deal with the challenges the world is facing nowadays and showcases the latest proposals on global security, trade, economic growth, jobs and so on.
Among various global challenges, demographic problems have always been paid attention to. According to data released by Chinese National Bureau of Statistics on January 17th, the population aged 60 and above in China was more than 296 million, accounting for 21.1% of the total population in 2023. Facing aging population and other demographic problems, how can countries achieve sustainable development in the future?
Parfait M Eloundou-Enyegue, professor in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University sheds light on global demographic challenges and sustainable development of population. He emphasized that finding the right balance in population is crucial for achieving sustainable development.
The interview also delves into a concerning issue over the world which is the youth employment. Professor Eloundou-Enyegue suggests that the long-term solution for employment involves establishing a stabilized system by controlling population dynamics and ensuring that school education is responsive to the needs of the labor market.
Finding the right balance in population to achieve sustainable development
SFC Markets and Finance: From your perspective, what are the main demographic challenges faced by different regions nowadays?
Parfait M Eloundou-Enyegue: In the world, if you want to describe the current situation in one single word, the word is diversity. If you look across the world, and if you look towards 2050 and 2010, you have very different situations, depending on whether you look at the poorest country of the world, or countries that are a little bit more advanced economically.
Among countries that are the 46 least developed countries in the world, population is really growing, is going to double between now and 2050. And so the problem that poses is you going to have a hard time meeting the basic needs, but also meeting the goals of sustainable development. So that's at the low end of the spectrum.
Now, countries that are more advanced economically have almost the opposite problem. They are going to peak in their population before the turn of the century, and populations want to start declining. And so these countries have to contend with aging population and declining population size. Basically they have to address all the issues that have to do with aging population, pension systems, health and retirement system, etc.
Each side has a different problem, and is really a very different set of problems. Now, in addition to population growth, you have other questions that have to do with immigration, with health and pandemics, etc.
SFC Markets and Finance: Could you further discuss how could the population problems connect to the global sustainable development?
Parfait M Eloundou-Enyegue: The population is a key factor in sustainable development, because the goal of sustainable development is to achieve the greatest good possible for most people, while at the same time preserving the environment. And so the population element is at the center, because we really need to feed, house and cloth all the people, and the more people we need to feed and cloth, the greater genre is going to be.
But at the same time, people are also a resource. People are the ones that are producing these resources. So people are both a resource and a potential problem. And so finding the right balance, finding the right makes of providing resources that are feeding everybody is a challenge.
On a global scale, you have to make sure that countries that are rich have enough people to sustain them, and countries that are poor don't have too many that they cannot feed. But even within the same country, if you look at the life stage, we all have stages in our lives when we are productive, and stages when we depend on other people. So we have to manage the balance between the number of years when you are going to school, you're not productive, you depend on other people, and the time when you're retired. That balance needs to be achieved as well. So finding the right balance in population is really a key in achieving sustainable development. It can be an asset and it's also close to a burden that we need to address.
The education training should be responsive to the needs of labor market
SFC Markets and Finance: I learned that you had a lot of teaching experience before. For youth employment and education, what intervention or policy do you consider as the most effective to promote the youth employment particularly in developing countries?
Parfait M Eloundou-Enyegue: You can think about solutions in the short term, immediate term. And here, government can intervene by creating employment schemes. You may have a major public works project, then you can hire a lot of youth. You can also provide incentives for businesses. Provide subsidies for businesses so that they can hire more.
You can also provide income relief for people who are unemployed. You can stimulate and encourage self-employment, (which is for) people to find a personal job. You can improve the information system and the communication between job seekers and those who need the men in case there is a mismatch. So this is really for the short term.
But for the long term, an economy has to maintain a balance between population, how many babies are born, how they go through the school system, and what the labor market can support. And so you need to have a balance and equilibrium through the entire system.
If it gets out of balance, you're going to keep having a problem, and you have to keep finding emergency solution. So the long term solution is just try to get that system to be stabilized by controlling the dynamics of population, paying attention to the quality of training that students getting at the school so that is responsive to the needs of the labor market, but also creating avenues for employment, and making sure that economic growth is widely shared. As the economy grows, you still have opportunities to employ large numbers of people.
SFC Markets and Finance: So for a bigger scale, how does the local context influence the education sustainable development? Is it also related to the long-term effort you have mentioned?
Parfait M Eloundou-Enyegue: To the local context, there are many details in regulating that entire system. You have to really consider regional inequality within each country. You have different cultures and readiness to participate in the education system. You have to consider gender equality, which is again, a thing that is very much in flags.
In many countries in the world, you used to have girls not having access to education, and so you need to address this. But the trend is being corrected. In some countries actually going to have the flip side of the equation happening.
You have to make sure, as I said before, that the quality of education is consistent with the skills that are needed in the labor market. You have to make sure that there's a little bit of balance between the payoff of education and the money you invest in education to go through college and so forth, has to be, to some extent paid back. Getting a good education should be rewarded in the labor market, so that people have an incentive to train hard in the fields that are demanded in the labor market.
The notion of development has changed tremendously over time
SFC Markets and Finance: You used to be a member of drafting the 1st Quadrennial Report on Sustainable Development Goals. From your perspective, how has the focus of the Sustainable Development Goals maintained or shifted over time?
Parfait M Eloundou-Enyegue: If we start even before we get to the Sustainable Development Goals, the notion of development itself has changed tremendously over time, over the last 50 years. 60 to 70 years ago, if you were talking about development, people just thought you were talking about income, or GDP per capita, how much money people are making.
But we have come to recognize that development is broader than this. (Development) is health, is education, is inequality, is women's status, is peace, etc. So it is all these things. And that's how we got to sustainable development with 17 goals.
But having gotten there, we have realized that focusing on 17 goals maybe a little overwhelming. So this tendency is to really draw attention to three big areas, the income area, which is the economic area, the social area, which is inequality, and the environmental area, which is preserving the environment.
But most importantly, because the world has realized that the area in which we haven't made a lot of progress is really the environment first and inequality second. And so this is why currently the focus seems to be very heavily on the environment and inequality.
SFC Markets and Finance: We are on the halfway achieving The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, are you optimistic with our accomplishment so far?
Parfait M Eloundou-Enyegue: It’s both. I'm optimistic in the sense that this greater awareness of the urgency that we need to address the problem of environment, but then has to be followed by action. It is not enough to be aware that there's a problem, we have to realize that we can do something about it, and we have to be willing to do something about it. So by nature, I tend to be optimistic as I look at the work and the energy of people who are working on the frontline of addressing these questions. The UN, and the civil society organization in different countries. There are reasons to be optimistic.
But it's also true that there's always a lot of inertia in getting people to change. People do not change as fast as you like. There's a weight of tradition. There is sometimes a tendency to assume that somebody else is going to take care of the problem, and I don't have to change. It's somebody else's problem to solve. And so that inertia is one reason that is not optimistic as we would like.
SFC Markets and Finance: For an individual scale, do you have any advice for young people who cannot immediately find a job?
Parfait M Eloundou-Enyegue: I'm so glad you ask this question, because it's a question that I'm working on personally. I'm working with youth trying to help them navigate that time between a school and work, because it's also a time when you move from being young to being an adult. So it's really a delicate moment.
My answer is finding work is the narrow objective. The broader objective is also finding yourself and finding the contribution that we want to make to the society. What I would say, not necessarily the immediate charm, even before people complete their education, they have to be thinking constantly about the difference that they're going to make in the world.
What kind of job do they want, and why? What are they good at? And if you get your ideal job, how is that going to change the world, besides giving you a paycheck. The closer you are to studying and to working in an area that you enjoy, that you passionate about, that you have a comparative advantage of, that you have skills for, the easier it is going to get a job, and the easier it is going to excel at that job and be fulfilled in that job.
And so, a not totally helpful answer to your question is that I think even if it's a time of profound despair for many youth, keep trying to find yourself. Let's take this moment of job search as an opportunity and to think about what would be my ideal job. How do I create that ideal job? How do I make the world better through my work in that particular area? And it's been my experience as an educator that everybody has a talent, everybody has a genius.
But sometimes it happens that you too often, especially in countries that are relatively poor, you have people who work in areas that happen to be the area where they find a job. That's not what they were meant for. We may have a kid who is perhaps a great artist or a great pianist, and then they end up being an accountant. They are going to get a job, but I don't think they're going to be the best version of themselves. My answer would then be thinking big. Think beyond. Think of the job not as an end, but as a mean to be fulfilled and to make a difference in the world.
策划：于晓娜
监制：施诗
责任编辑：李依农
记者：杨雨莱
剪辑：李群
拍摄：李依农
设计：李基礼
新媒体统筹：丁青云 曾婷芳 赖禧 黄达迅
海外运营监制: 黄燕淑
海外运营内容统筹: 黄子豪
海外运营编辑：庄欢 吴婉婕 龙李华 张伟韬
出品：南方财经全媒体集团
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