Human Capital Shapes the India-China Demographic Race
HKUST IEMS Thought Leadership Brief No. 104
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Demography is defined as the scientific study of changing population size and structures. In terms of total population size, the race between the world’s “demographic billionaires” is over as India surpassed China as the most populous country in 2023 and will likely remain so for the rest of the twenty-first century and beyond. China’s population decline and rapid aging appear to present an existential threat to the continuation of its economic success story. However, total size, age and sex are just a few of the many dimensions of demographic change important to a country’s economic standing (Golley & Tyers, 2012; Lutz et al., 2014). A country’s economy, and therefore its overall geopolitical power, depends more on the number of workers and their productivity, than on gross population numbers alone (Jones, 2016). In a paper recently published in PRPR, we reassess the demographic race between India and China by looking more closely at the composition of the population, in particular the size of the labor force and its human capital.
About the Author
Guillaume Marois is a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, and a Distinguished Professor at the Asian Demographic Research Institute (ADRI) of Shanghai University in China. He specialises in population projections and microsimulation methods.
Stuart Gietel-Basten is a Professor of Social Science and Public Policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is also the Associate Dean (Research) of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Associate Director of the Center for Aging Science and Associate Director of Leadership and Public Policy Executive Education.
Wolfgang Lutz is the IIASA Sherpa for Asia and a Distinguished Emeritus Research Scholar at IIASA. He is the Founding Director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a partnership between IIASA, the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. A leading academic in the field of population and sustainable development, Lutz was among the UN-appointed scientists who authored the Global Sustainable Development Report 2019: The Future is Now. He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Wittgenstein Prize, two ERC Advanced Grants, the Mattei Dogan Award (IUSSP), the Science Prize of the Austrian Research Association, and the 2024 Yidan Prize for his contributions to the theory and practice of education. He is a member of several academies, including the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy Leopoldina, the US National Academy of Sciences, the World Academy of Sciences TWAS, the Finnish Society for Sciences and Letters, and the Academia Europaea. He also serves as Special Advisor to European Commission Vice-President Dubravka Šuica. Lutz has authored over 300 scientific articles and book chapters, and wrote or edited 27 books and special issues on population forecasting, education as a standard demographic dimension, and population- development-environment interactions.
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