The EconomistDecember 7th 2019 Special reportAsian tigers 112 President Moon’s government has cut the
maximum workweek to 52 hours (although
exceptions persist). Ms Yang chose a more
radical solution: moving to Australia, from
where she urges her 30,000 Facebook fol-
lowers to quit their workaholism. “Taiwan-
ese don’t have time for life,” she says.
Time is one constraint; another is cost.
Although society as a whole benefits from
the vigour of each new generation, the cost
of raising them falls squarely on one group:
women of childbearing age. With elderly
parents to worry about, little help from
their husbands (men do only a fifth of the
household chores in South Korea) and in-
adequate help from the state, many women
have chosen to marry late, if at all, and have
one child, if any.
Their predicament is worsened by one
of the tigers’ proudest boasts: their com-
mitment to education. Although the tigers
all provide decent public schooling, many
parents feel obliged to splash out on expen-
sive private alternatives and additional tu-
toring. Some of this extra effort may add to
a child’s knowledge and future productivi-
ty. But much of it is mere credentialism, an
attempt to improve a child’s position in the queue for the best uni-
versities, and hence the best jobs. Education has become an arms
race in which one parent’s additional outlay of time and money
forces others to follow suit.
In South Korea, Mr Moon has promised various acts of collec-
tive educational disarmament. He wants to merge universities
into a single network, flatten the schools hierarchy and even dis-
courage employers from hiring on the basis of academic creden-
tials. Some of these proposals seem unworkable. His critics call it a
“war on meritocracy”. But there is a distinction between merit,
which should be rewarded, and wasteful attempts to signal merit,
which are damaging. Tiger parents risk hurting the tigers.
Faced with this burden, some parents fabricate their children’s
qualifications. One academic paper in 2009 on the genetic precur-
sors of disease was supposedly co-written by the daughter of Cho
Kuk, Mr Moon’s justice minister, even though she was only a
schoolgirl at the time. He was forced to resign in shame.
Shy, but not retiring
To improve their unfavourable age structure, the tigers will have to
combine shorter working weeks with longer working lives. They
will need more people like Neo Kwee Leng. As he approached 60,
he gave up his life as a small businessman to spend his days at the
“Loving Heart” centre, an activity hub for the elderly in Singapore.
It was not an act of retirement: he joined as a manager. Nor, as it
turned out, was it much of a downshift. About 100 people drop in
daily, each with different needs. Some
come for medical check-ups, others to play
ukulele, still others just to chat.
So Mr Neo upgraded his managerial
skills, learning Excel and data analysis.
“The hardest part is my eyesight,” he says.
He has also run seminars on using smart-
phones. His training—of himself and oth-
ers—is part of SkillsFuture, a government
programme to promote lifelong learning.
In the tigers, lifelong can be lengthy in-
deed. Just as they have some of the lowestfertility rates, they also have some of the highest life expectancies.
Even at 60 their people can still expect to live another 25 years or
more, enough time to master both Excel and the ukulele.
Another way for the tigers to cope with their ageing is to permit
more immigration. The foreign population accounts for 6% of the
workforce in Taiwan and about 3.3% in South Korea. That is low by
Western standards, but higher than Japan, where foreigners make
up only 2%. In the two tiger cities the reliance on immigrants is far
more dramatic. Much of Hong Kong’s population (39%) was born
elsewhere, including over 2.2m from other parts of China. The for-
eign-born still occupy prominent positions in the courts, regula-
tory bodies and even the police. The city also relies on over 380,000
maids and nannies (mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia),
who constitute over 8% of the workforce.
Singapore has 1.4m foreign workers, more than a third of its la-
bour force. The government believes immigrants are needed to do
the lower-skilled jobs that Singaporeans will no longer do. A white
paper in 2013 forecast a population of up to 6.9m by 2030, from
5.7m today. In so doing, it inadvertently revealed the limits of
openness in the city-state. The projection fuelled worries that im-
migrants would overburden the city’s infrastructure and public
services. In the rarest of scenes for Singapore, a few thousand peo-
ple protested in a park, some holding aloft signs such as “Singa-
pore for Singaporeans”.
Immigration is not the only way to take advantage of more
abundant workforces elsewhere. As well as importing labour, the
tigers can, and have, exported capital. By lending and investing
abroad, they have accumulated claims on the output of foreign
workforces, without all the difficulties of bringing those workers
to their shores. In Hong Kong, the net annual income from these
foreign assets already amounts to almost $2,500 per person.
The tigers have accumulated these overseas investments by
consistently selling more things to the rest of the world than they
buy from it. Singapore’s current-account surplus last year was a
whopping 18% of gdp. These trade imbalances have not yet pro-
voked much scrutiny or condemnation from America. But that
could change. These four economies are, after all, worthy of the
world’s close attention. 7The burden of ageingEducation has
become an arms
race...Tiger
parents risk
hurting the tigers