India enjoys a demographic advantage over China, which could confer a ‘dividend' to the former and be a ‘drag' on the latter's future economic growth prospects.

“China's demographic window of opportunity is rapidly closing, while India's will remain open until at least 2030,” a new report by the Rand Corporation has said.

The report, titled ‘China and India, 2025: A Comparative Assessment', has pointed out that demographic dividends are estimated to have contributed one-fourth to two-fifths of East Asian per capita GDP growth in the late 20{+t}{+h} century. And India currently has the opportunity to reap this dividend.

According to the Rand Corporation study, the proportion of China's population that is of working age has already peaked and will start decreasing from 2011. India's, on the other hand, will keep increasing and peak in 2030. Even after that, it will decline “very slowly”.

By 2035, 21 per cent of China's population, against India's 10.2 per cent, will be aged 65 years or more.

Moreover, even within the working-age population (technically defined to be between 15 and 64 years old), India has a larger proportion of people between 15 and 34 years of age, whereas China's is more skewed towards 35 to 64 years. That represents a huge positive, since “younger workers are generally more vigorous and adaptive”.

But at the same time, even this potential demographic dividend for India “can be a source of drag if jobs are not available,” the report has warned.

An older workforce may not be particularly problematic for China as it tries to develop a post-industrial economy “and productivity may not decline as much with age for more highly cognitive tasks as it does for physical tasks”.

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