Lant Pritchett challenges us to think radically about the global allocation of workers over the next 100 years. He wants us to think about huge numbers of temporary workers. This idea now is completely off the table in the United States. But it’s an idea whose time may be coming.

He is currently Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics in the School of Public Policy and the co-founder and Research Director of Labor Mobility Partnerships. He is a long-time advocate for easing the barriers to global mobility.

I’ve addressed the imbalance between rich and emerging country workforce demographics. Part of the picture is the rise in formal education in the emerging countries, which allows their workers to be more productive.

Among industrialized countries, production of goods and services and the financing of retirement has during the 20th century required much more working age persons as a ratio of older persons.

Rich, industrialized countries will experience shrinking labor forces and increasing elderly populations, while poorer regions, particularly in Africa and South Asia, will see substantial growth in their labor force-aged populations. ​

Pritchett sees these demographic differences as creating a massive opportunity for “age arbitrage,” where young workers from labor-abundant countries can move to labor-scarce, ageing societies through expanded legal pathways, including rotational labor mobility. ​ by 2050, there could be 130 to 300 million people working in rich countries on a rotational basis, depending on various assumptions about labor force participation and migration policies. ​

He argues that with the right legal and administrative arrangements, rotational labor mobility can be implemented in a safe, orderly, and rights-respecting way, benefiting all parties involved. ​

Per Pritchett, a “well-regulated and orderly system for rotational labor force mobility” threads the three-fold political needle facing rich societies by acknowledging three questions about who can legally reside and work in their country:

(1) Who is the “future of us”—who is to be allowed to live and work in our country on a direct expected pathway to citizenship and hence participate in the shaping of the future of “our” society and culture and politics,

(2) Who will we admit as “movers of distress”—how will our country act with respect to refugees, asylum seekers, and those fleeing intolerable conditions (a category which will expand with climate change), and

(3) Who will we allow to legally reside and work in our country on a fixed term basis, and under what terms and conditions (including restrictions on occupations, sectors, regions), in order to help us meet our labor force needs?

One aspect of very large temporary worker flows is who captures the retirement contributions of these workers, the host country or the sending country?

Some facts: From 2020 to 2050 the population 65+ in Italy will grow by 5.4 million (39%) but the population 15-64 will fall by 12.4 million (33%). The projected ratio of the labor force to those 65+ will fall to less than one worker for every person 65+. This is an extreme case of demographic change. In the United States, the demographics are relatively young due to immigration. The ratio between the 15-64 cohort and 65 + shows this trend: 1950, 7.75; 2000, 5.17; 2022, 3.82; 2050, 2.8.