Demographics: 'dilemma' or 'dividend'?

And a four-person panel debate demonstrated just how complex the demographic issue is, and why it goes way beyond an increase in income tax or the introduction of a goods and services tax.

The complexity means that finding a solution is difficult, near impossible to be honest, even though many prospects do pop up for consideration from time to time.

One of them during the mid-term came from keynote speaker Dr Matthew Agarwala.

Having noted implications of the island’s demographics for the delivery and demand for public services, Dr Agarwala came up with the possibility of turning around our problems and focusing instead on ‘demographic dividend’.

Any internet search will reveal that the demographic dividend is normally used in connection with a growth in working age population – such as that experienced in Guernsey from the 1960s onwards.

Can Guernsey turn around its own problems by harnessing its largest age bracket to make a difference? Frankly, it seems one of the more difficult of the various challenges thrown up by the whole demographics issue.

Speak to most islanders approaching or past retirement age and they will say they deserve it. Particularly the generation which worked hard in the 1960s, often holding down two jobs, and then contributed to the transformation of the island’s major industry from horticulture to financial services in the 1970s. Do they want to work well into their seventies? To retrain?

Or maybe the opportunity is to look at the younger end of the population, and challenge ourselves to stop what the IoD calls the ‘missing decade’ of 20- to 30-year-olds. That brings its own challenges, with housing top of the list, but the debate made clear the career opportunities for that generation are strong, and arguably should be promoted better?

Regrettably the takeaway is whether you pose island demographics as a ‘dilemma’ or a ‘dividend’, the challenge remains stark.