The red line is the percentage of the working-age population in the labor force.
Since 1997, inactivity has stuck at just over a fifth of the working-age population.
In some villages half the working-age population works abroad, practically all illegally and with poor pay.
In the 15 members of the European Union the working-age population will start to fall after 2010.
Barely more than 4% of the working-age population is jobless, and inward immigration is expanding the labour force.
Western Europe's working-age population is already shrinking, though not as fast as Japan's.
Much of the working-age population gets subsidized insurance because employer-paid health insurance premiums are not treated as taxable income.
And with the deaths concentrated in the working-age population, each new case adds to a widening circle of economic hardship.
Like the U.S., China is expected to have a high population of retirees and a smaller number in the working-age population.
China's growth rate is bound to slow in coming years as its working-age population starts to shrink and productivity growth declines.
One obvious consequence will be pressure on the social-insurance system, including health care and pensions, as the working-age population shrinks dramatically.
As the country gets richer and its working-age population starts to shrink, that growth rate is likely to tail off to perhaps 8% soon.
The number of people over 65 will be equivalent to 60% of the working-age population in Europe in 2050, compared with only 40% in America.
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The elderly on Medicare and the poor on Medicaid use more medical services, and therefore are at greater risk for poor care, than the working-age population.
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The unemployment rate actually rose, to 9.1%, in May: the rate of job creation is barely keeping track with the natural increase in the working-age population.
In September 2011 about 16% of the working-age population in Wales claimed out-of-work benefits, compared to an average of 13% in Great Britain, according to Welsh government statistics.
China's working-age population will not increase between now and 2030.
While China is about to see its working-age population shrink (see article), India is enjoying the sort of bulge in manpower which brought sustained booms elsewhere in Asia.
But fewer people remained out of the labour force altogether: 21.1% of the working-age population was neither in work nor looking for a job, the lowest rate since 1992.
In Japan, according to Ken Okamura, a strategist with Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, the birth rate has been so low that the working-age population will actually start to decline next year.
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China's working-age population, defined as people from ages 15 to 59, fell last year for the first time in decades, a result of the national one-child policy that was implemented in 1980.
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Greg Ward, of the council's economic development unit, thinks investors had been put off by the city's high employment rate, which stood at just over 80% of the working-age population in 2008.
While Japanese alarmists blame a lack of competitiveness, the fact is that Japan's working-age population is declining, and within that population the proportion of workers willing to do manual jobs is also falling.
Because Europeans are not having enough babies and are living so long, the European Union would need to import 1.6m migrants a year simply to keep its working-age population stable between now and 2050 (see article).
When the Tories say that a higher proportion of the working-age population is now employed in Britain than in any other big European country, Labour dismisses the claim this is true only because of an increase in the number of part-time workers, it says.
The working-age population is shrinking.
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You might think, then, that if we looked at the average number of hours worked by all those of working age - dividing the total number of hours worked by the working age population - Germany would come out on top.
Meanwhile, the total working age population - those aged between 15 and 64 - will fall by 20m.
Last year the ranks of working-age Chinese fell as a percentage of the population.
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