Governments need to leverage the silver generation better

The rich world faces chronic labour shortages, and various countries have underscored the challenge they face with a ‘baby bust’. With growing apprehension toward immigration, many have been promoting, with questionable success, schemes to increase birth rates. But there’s an underutilised group with immense potential to overcome these hurdles: the silver generation—those aged 50 and above.

Better policies to include this older generation into the economy and workforce are crucial to addressing labour shortages and the effects of declining birth rates. With clear productivity gains and better health outcomes, this generation could be another type of demographic dividend for global economies.

How can governments integrate older workers better? Singapore and Canada provide some examples.

Singapore has devised policies to engage the silver generation in its workforce, focusing on financial security and retraining. Under its Retirement and Re-Employment Act, firms are mandated to offer re-employment to workers upto the age of 67, and even till the age of 70, provided they meet performance and health requirements. In parallel it has mandated a minimum retirement age of 63, before which workers cannot be forced to retire by their employers. In addition, the country also provides an upskilling initiative, the SkillsFuture Program, which helps mid-career professionals aged 40 and above learn new skills to stay upto date with an ever changing economy. The program provides funding and tax credits to Singaporeans to access these initiatives across the country. This will be challenging for many countries, given Singapore's relative wealth, and its small size, but underscores the importance of training programs in keeping older workers employable relevant in a rapidly changing market.

A more hands-off approach is to build better flexibility into pension plans, which can be structured to allow workers to withdraw some of their pension, but keep working; this is similar to Canada’s flexible pension plan. In Canada, after the age of 60, people can partially withdraw part of their pension to fund expenses, and still contribute to their pension fund while working; this allows Canadians to view retirement / work as a choice. The flexibility can also allow workers to transition into retirement, or freelance, while supporting themselves effectively. Moreover, it allows older workers to continue to support pensions/social security systems, which are getting more expensive.

I explore more of these ideas in this article, but I'd love to discuss this idea further here!