Migration Needed to Fill Labor Gap in Industrial Nations
More evidence that immigration into major economies will need to increase significantly in the next decade to compensate for domestic labor shortages emerges in a new study from KPMG International.
The supply of both skilled and unskilled labor in major economies is expected to decrease significantly over the next decade, creating challenges for business leaders and opportunities for the global workforce to migrate to these understaffed countries for employment, the study says.
The retirement of the baby boomer (born 1946–1961) generation from the workforce and a lack of Generation Ys (born 1976–1991) to replace them has already resulted in the contraction of the labor pool in countries such as Japan, with Australia, Canada, China, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, United States, much of Western Europe, and other nations expected to follow suit in the next decade, according to The Global Skills Convergence: Issues and Ideas for the Management of an International Workforce.
“Increasing globalization, combined with the effects of what can be referred to as the ‘demographic faultline,’ is likely to present challenges for multinational corporations unprepared for the change,” said Bernard Salt, a partner with KPMG in Australia and primary author of the study. “Our study argues that the labor shortage will result in what we call a ‘global skills convergence’— a net flow of skilled and unskilled workers migrating between the developed and developing worlds as geo-political barriers continue to diminish. Companies should be ready to manage their workforces in this new reality,” he said.
The KPMG study also predicts that selected countries in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East as well as India will not face the same labor shortages. As a consequence, economic migration from areas of labor surplus to areas of labor demand may occur later in the century.
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