China will gradually raise the statutory retirement age, now among the lowest in the world, to allow people to work longer as it struggles to ease growing pressure on pension budgets as many provinces are already facing deficits, quoted by News.bg.
Reform is urgent, with China's expected increase in life expectancy rising to 78 years by 2021 from about 44 years in 1960, overtaking the United States, and expected to exceed 80 years by 2050.
Sunday's announcement came in a key policy document that also laid out plans to sharpen a strategy to combat a falling birth rate and an aging population, which will fall for a second year in a row in 2023 and is expected to decline for decades.
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The reforms outlined in the document are expected to be completed by 2029.
The retirement age is now 60 for men - which is five to six years below that in most advanced economies - while it is 55 for women working in offices and 50 for women working in factories.
National health authorities expect the large proportion of people aged 60 and over to grow from 280 million to more than 400 million by 2035, or the equivalent of the entire current population of Great Britain and the United States combined.
Most countries have raised the retirement age in response to demographic pressures to protect pension funds and slow a potential shrinking workforce, said Michael Herman, senior adviser at the United Nations Development and Population Fund.
"This is a standard policy tool and doing it gradually makes a lot of sense. It's important to do this in a flexible way,'' he said, adding that workers should be able to work part-time or from home or be engaged on a project basis.
Currently, each Chinese pensioner is supported by the contributions of five workers. The ratio is half of what it was a decade ago and is trending towards 4 to 1 in 2030 and 2 to 1 in 2050.
Economists say China's current pension system, which relies on a shrinking active workforce to pay the pensions of a growing number of retirees, is unsustainable and needs to be reformed.
Eleven of China's 31 provincial-level jurisdictions have pension budget deficits, according to data from the finance ministry. The state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences predicts the pension system will run out of money by 2035.