Quote:
Originally Posted by Maggie Leung
Infrastructure is important, but China's demographics are leading to labor shortages. Its population is aging (average age per capita).
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Plus their expectations on wages and working conditions are changing.
It's no longer enough to *have* a job; they now aspire to something noticeably better than slave labor conditions. There's more to life than subsistence and as the chinese economy improves so do its citizens' aspirations.
That is the implied deal in the whole cheap-labor "developing nation" economic model; one generation sacrifices so the next won't have to. Well, China is reaching the Next Generation. And they, reasonably, believe they deserve better.
(About time, too.)
The cheap-labor ramp to economic development isn't quite played out yet, but if none of the countries that could reasonably benefit from the emerging opening take advantage, we'll likely see a new wave of automation-based cost-reduction like we saw in the 80's before mainland China opened up.
It's not a given, though; if the world economy softens again (likely, actually) there won't be demand for extra product *or* capital for the automation investment. A bigger (and more proximate) threat than a cheap-labor shortage is a capital shortage.