Age Structure of the Workforce in Growing and Declining Industries-Evidence from Hong Kong

部分内容如下：

Declining Industries: Evidence from Hong Kong
June 7, 2007
Abstract. Industry-speci…c human capital reduces the incentive for older workers to
leave declining industries and raises the incentive for younger workers to join growing
industries. Using the industry restructuring experience of Hong Kong, we …nd that
a one percent increase in employment share of an industry is associated with a 0.60
year decrease in the average age of its workforce. The relationship is more pronounced
among less educated workers, who have less general human capital, and male workers,
who are more committed to the labor force, than among well educated workers and
female workers.
JEL classi…cation. J10, J23, J24, L16
Keywords. Industry-speci…c human capital, industry upgrading, sectoral shifts
 

1. Introduction
A stereotypical worker in the information technology sector is one in his twenties or
thirties, while the rural agricultural economy is usually depicted to be populated by
older folks. Such stylized characterizations are not a pure fiction: there are indeed
large and systematic variations in the age structure of the workforce across di¤erent
industries. In Hong Kong, the average age of agricultural workers is 15.5 years older
than that of workers in the communications industry (49.4 and 33.9 years, respec-
tively).1 More interestingly, we find that the age structure of the workforce in an
industry is not invariant to changes in the economic environment. Growing indus-
tries tend to be populated by younger workers, while older workers stay in declining
industries. Take the apparel and textile industry in Hong Kong for example. The
industry was a main engine of the early economic growth of Hong Kong (Chen 1979),
employing 26.3 percent of the total workforce in 1976. The average worker in that in-
dustry then (31.3 years) was 3.8 years younger than the representative worker. With
the outsourcing of manufacturing work to mainland China and the restructuring of
the Hong Kong economy toward the service industries (see, for example, Suen 1995;
Hsieh and Woo 2005), apparels and textiles have steadily lost employment share in
the 1980s and 1990s. In 2001 the employment share had shrunk to 3.4 percent. Mean-
while the average age of a textile worker had risen to 42.1 years, which was 3.9 years
higher than the economy-wide average. Our paper is an attempt to document and
understand these changes in age structure across industries in the context of indus-
trial upgrading in Hong Kong. We believe that our …ndings are not unique to the
local experience.