Accumulation of human capital is indispensable to spur economic growth. If students fail to acquire needed skills, not only will they have a hard time finding high-wage employment in the future but the development of the economies in which they work may also stagnate owing to a shortage of human capital. The overall goal of this study is to try to understand if China is ready in terms of the education of its labour force to progress from middle-income to high-income country status. To achieve this goal, we seek to understand the share of the labour force that has attained at least some upper secondary schooling (upper secondary attainment) and to benchmark these educational attainment rates against the rates of the labour forces in other countries (e.g. high-income/OECD countries; a subset of G20 middle-income/BRICS countries). Using the sixth population census data, we are able to show that China's human capital is shockingly poor. In 2010, only 24 per cent of China's entire labour force (individuals aged 25–64) had ever attended upper secondary school. This rate is less than one-third of the average upper secondary attainment rate in OECD countries. China's overall upper secondary attainment rate and the attainment rate of its youngest workers (aged 25–34) is also the lowest of all the BRICS countries (with the exception of India for which data were not available). Our analysis also demonstrates that the statistics on upper secondary education reported by the Ministry of Education (MoE) are overestimated. In the paper, we document when MoE and census-based statistics diverge, and raise three possible policy-based reasons why officials may have begun to have an incentive to misreport in the mid-2000s.

Chronic disease, mobility limitations and low physical functioning are determinants of an earlier age of retirement. Therefore, long-term population trends in these factors may have an impact on the proportion of individuals near traditional retirement age who continue to work. Our objective is to develop a projection model that accounts for trends in these factors in order to estimate the proportion of the population aged 55–74 with the capacity to participate in the labour force. We used logistic regression models to quantify how chronic disease, mobility and functional status predict labour force participation among individuals aged 55–59. Next, we obtained estimates of the population prevalence of each of these predictors for the years 2010–2050. We then used estimated coefficients from the logistic regression models to predict the age-specific probability of capacity for work up to the age of 74. We find that population capacity for work depends on trends in disability and on level of education. Future population capacity for work depends on trends in functional limitations primarily in the population with lower levels of education. Changes in functional limitations, changes in the environment, technology and social policy targeted towards individuals with lower levels of education could result in mitigation of future decreasing capacity for work in the population near retirement age.

This essay assesses various dimensions of China's defence industrial enterprises. It argues that the defence industrial system should be divided into two tiers: tier one, composed of weapons and equipment producers for the military, and tier two, composed of “civilian” industrial enterprises that provided critical inputs for tier one enterprises, and which in national emergencies could be mobilized to produce weapons themselves. In 1985, there were 1,158 tier one defence enterprises and 827 tier two enterprises among China's 8,285 large- and medium-scale enterprises. Additional information is provided on defence enterprise shares of the economy at the provincial and the national levels, on enterprise distribution by industrial sector, and on when enterprises were built. The article attempts to estimate the total number of workers, output value and fixed assets of the defence industrial sector, and their weight in the national economy.

Canada's demographic situation in the future will differ substantially from what we have known in the past. Unless there is an early return to high fertility the average age of both the population and the labour force will increase substantially, while the overall dependency ratio will be low by historical standards. Our analysis suggests that up to about 2010 population change will have less of an impact on the real (i.e., constant—price) level of aggregate government expenditures than on the size of the real gross national product However, we can anticipate compositional changes in government expenditures as a result of population change: very large increases in the real social security costs, lesser (but still large) increases in health costs, and a reduction in education costs. Finally, a relatively large portion of the aggregate expenditure increases will be at the federal government level.