The labour minister, Tobias Billstrom, says foreign workers are needed to counter a greying population and shrinking labour force.
China's rapid ageing, combined with a shrinking labour force, will "fundamentally reshape the Chinese economy and society", he suggests.
A shrinking labour force implies a slower growth rate, future problems for financing public-sector pensions, and greater opposition to reform than in a more youthful country.
Take away Hispanics and other fast-growing minorities, and America's numbers look like those for Italy, a country full of pensioners with a shrinking labour force.
With a shrinking labour force, the standard estimate for Japan in 2012 – that is, before Abenomics – had output per employed worker growing by 3.08% year on year.
What it reflects, though, is an arithmetical calculation based on two numbers: the shrinking labour force just described; and the slow annual growth in productivity in the 1990s of about 2%, a whole percentage point less than in the 1980s.
Authorities have begun to accept (much too late) the demographic downsides of maintaining a one-child quota: among them a shrinking labour force and an ageing population that will put a strain on a smaller generation of children and taxpayers.
Men and women must be able to share in the benefits of growth rather than finding themselves competing for scarce and poorly paid jobs in a shrinking labour market.
In March 2009, the international immigration analyst Arno Tanner warned that in Africa "the mixture of rising food prices, increasing difficulty to secure international loans, deteriorating export avenues, and shrinking labour markets will cause brain drain, societal unrest, and conflict".
Space needs to be made in the public purse for child care, pensions and medical costs.A shrinking labour force, with efforts to give women a bigger role, also means that the great worry of the past five years that the rise of part-time and contract workers was producing a two-tier workforce is likely to fade.
