2023-11-01 01:19:34
Among many others, the world faces two great challenges such as technological and environmental transition. There is a third element, of an even more global nature but that has an especially direct impact on Spain and the Basque Country, which is demographic aging. An aspect “to which due attention is not always paid” and which currently constitutes “one of the great drivers of social transformation.”
This is what Sara Baliña, deputy director of the National Foresight and Strategy Office of the Government of Spain, believes, general directorate under the Presidency in charge of analyzing the challenges and opportunities that the coming decades will bring and helping the country to face them.
The Galician economist starred in the main presentation of the conference ‘Industrial employment, quality employment in a world that is changing’, organized by EL CORREO and the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and held at the Euskalduna Palace in Bilbao.
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Baliña emphasizes that 20% of the Spanish population is in an elderly age group, and that within two decades one in three people will be 65 or older. A circumstance that generates “a challenge in the form of a change in the composition of the workforce and its availability.”
This aging of the workforce is accompanied by two other transitions, such as the technological one, with the differential fact that represents “the great speed” of the changes it brings, such as the automation of tasks or new forms of work. A scenario that, although it will leave losers, “will have a net positive effect on employment.”
There is also the ecological transition, which beyond its environmental focus, also has consequences on the generation of employment and wealth.
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The common denominator of all of them is that they will force us to focus quickly and intelligently on “the transition from ‘brown’ jobs (more linked to production from fossil fuels) towards new sectors with a different, or ‘green’, technological component.” ».
“Rethinking” supply chains
Another additional element, and one that “can be a catalyst for change,” is international trade and the need to “rethink global supply chains.” In this reconfiguration there is an opportunity to “strengthen the industrial fabric in sectors that had a smaller role because until now we imported their products.”
Going into more detail about the challenge of demographic aging, Baliña warns that in the coming decades “three million assets in Spain” will be lost, which will constrain the possibilities of producing and growing at the current rate.
Aside from the fact that Spain “does not have a bad position” in the European index of active aging, “we have as a pending issue ensuring that those over 55 years of age are better inserted in the labor market.”
Another problem in the Spanish labor market is «the need for requalification. There is no culture of continuing to set foot in a university or vocational training center at 45, 50 or 55 years old. That is why one of the objectives must be to “improve the requalification of people of working age, and put emphasis on the elderly.”
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