The Future of Work in 9 Charts

The global workforce is undergoing a historic rebalancing, one that will reshape economies, migration patterns, and policy priorities for generations. In high-income countries, working-age populations are shrinking, the result of decades of declining fertility and rising life expectancy. Across Europe, Japan, and South Korea, older-age dependency ratios have climbed sharply, leaving fewer workers to support an expanding base of retirees.¹

India and China, the world’s two most populous countries, also command its largest reserves of working-age labor. But that dominance is diverging. China’s working-age population has passed its peak; what follows will be a long, slow decline.² India, buoyed by a younger demographic profile, will see its working-age population grow for several decades.³

Meanwhile, Africa is emerging as a defining force in the future global workforce. By 2050, Nigeria is projected to become the world’s third most-populous country, surpassing the U.S. to sit behind India and China.⁴African workers represent just 14% of the global workforce today; by 2100, they’ll be 40%. As other regions gray, Africa’s weight in the global labor market will only grow.

This shift carries real opportunity—for African countries that invest in their workforces, and for other countries that welcome migrants. But no single lever will be enough. Migrant workers face growing political backlash in many nations, and migration alone cannot fill widening labor shortages.⁵Governments will also need policies that bring traditionally underemployed groups, including women, people with disabilities, and older workers, more fully into the workforce.⁶

The window for action is open, but not indefinitely. The world’s working-age population is projected to peak at just over 5 billion by 2072, then enter a steady, prolonged decline.⁷

An aging world population is driving growing demand for healthcare workers—demand that an already strained global workforce is ill-equipped to meet. In 2024, people ages 70 or older were just 6.6% of the global population; by 2100, that share is expected to nearly triple.⁸ The workers needed to care for this growing older cohort simply do not exist in sufficient numbers.

The global healthcare workforce is already stretched thin. There were 29.8 million nurses worldwide in 2023—an increase of nearly 2 million from five years earlier—yet the world still needs 5.8 million more nurses to meet current needs.⁹ The gap extends well beyond nursing: By 2030, the global health workforce is anticipated to be short 11.1 million workers overall.¹⁰

That shortage is not evenly distributed. Worldwide, there are about 40 nurses for every 10,000 people,¹¹ but that average masks vast inequities in the availability of care. Whereas world-leader Monaco has 203 nurses for every 10,000 people, Chad and Djibouti have just one.

Wealthier countries have often addressed their staffing shortages at the expense of poorer ones. The U.S. and U.K., among others, have relied on recruiting foreign healthcare workers to fill staffing shortages rather than expanding domestic training—a pattern that fills gaps quickly in destination countries while draining the workforces of those that can least afford to lose workers. Remittances offer some offset: Nurses working abroad send money home, and in the Philippines, such transfers accounted for an estimated 2% of GDP in 2021.¹² But money is not a substitute for workers, and countries that invest heavily in training still face their own shortages as a result.¹³

Fixing this imbalance requires international coordination. The World Health Organization’s Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, adopted in 2010, provides a framework, calling on destination countries to invest in domestic training and to support sending countries rather than simply hiring away their workforces.¹⁴But implementation has been uneven—and an aging world could pay the price.¹⁵

Across the world, more older adults are staying in—or returning to—the workplace. Rising retirement ages, staffing shortages in key jobs, and personal preferences to keep working are collectively pushing labor force participation higher among people who, in previous generations, would have already retired.

Some governments are responding, driven as much by fiscal pressure as workers’ needs. Czechia, for example, recently changed its pension retirement age, made it easier for retirees to keep working, and trimmed future benefit levels to stretch funding. Belgium has planned a suite of pension reforms, including awarding bonuses for longer employment and requiring 20 years of work before benefits can be claimed.¹⁶ These reforms reflect a broader recognition that pension systems designed for shorter lives and larger working-age populations are no longer sustainable.¹⁷

Yet even with such reforms, older worker participation will have limits. South Korea offers an instructive case: 4 in 10 people ages 65 and older are currently working, the highest rate among OECD countries. But South Korea’s numbers reflect a unique combination of low pension payouts, high costs of living, and workplace structures that actively encourage older workers to stay employed.¹⁸

Elsewhere, age discrimination, rigid workplace policies, and limited reskilling opportunities push older people out of the workforce—often sooner than they’d like.¹⁹ In addition, across nearly every high-income country in the OECD, older men work at substantially higher rates than older women, a disparity that reflects structural inequities and the disproportionate care responsibilities that fall on older women.

Longer, healthier lives mean more older adults are physically and mentally capable of working longer than previous generations. The question is whether workplaces and policies will adapt quickly—and fairly—enough to meet them.

Work is becoming more flexible. But access to that flexibility is unequal, skewed toward higher-income workers and wealthier countries.

Today, more than half of high-income OECD countries have laws that guarantee workers’ rights to flexible scheduling and remote work.²⁰ The European Union has led the way: The EU Work-Life Balance Directive of 2019 pushed member states to legislate better work-life balance for caregivers by 2022. But other wealthy OECD countries, including the U.S., Switzerland, and Australia, have no such legal guarantees.

The reality within countries is no more equal. In the U.S., nearly 14% of workers worked from home in 2023, and they tended to earn significantly more than those who didn’t.²¹But the relationship between flexibility and privilege looks different in lower-income countries. There, home-based work reflects both opportunity and constraint—particularly for women, whose unpaid caregiving responsibilities may tether them to home and limit their options for paid employment.²²

Flexibility matters most when workers lack control. Long hours are one thing; long hours without any say over when or where you work is another. In South Africa, nearly 15% of workers log over 50 hours a week, with no legal right to request flexible arrangements. Meanwhile, in Mexico, more than a quarter of workers are putting in over 50 hours a week but can assert more control over how or when they work. Expanding worker control—through policy, employer commitment, or legal protection—may be one of the most direct routes to improving worker well-being worldwide.

Young people are the future global workforce, and ensuring they have access to quality employment and training opportunities is vital for the collective global economy. The global youth unemployment rate hit 13% in 2023, a 15-year low, reflecting a strong recovery from the disruptions of the pandemic. But gains were not universal: Young men benefited significantly more than young women.²³

The picture sharpens at the country level. Younger, lower-income countries tend to have higher shares of so-called NEET youth, or those not in education, employment, or training. In Somalia and Zimbabwe, more than half of people ages 15–24 are NEET, with about 6 in 10 young women especially left out in these countries.

Nigeria complicates the picture in an informative way. It is one of the world’s youngest and fastest-growing countries, yet its NEET rate of 13.6% is on par with older, wealthier nations like Austria and Canada. The gender gap in youth participation in education, employment, and training is also comparatively narrow. As Nigeria’s population surges over the coming century, those foundations could prove decisive: A young, energetic workforce is an asset if the conditions exist to sustain it.

In lower-income countries, most work opportunities are informal—piecework, day labor, subsistence farming—with lower wages, more safety hazards, and weaker legal and social protections.²⁴ It’s precisely this cluster of conditions that the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 8 targets through its commitment to decent work and economic growth.²⁵

Yet the informal economy is not always detrimental. For workers—particularly women—who might not otherwise have paid work at all, informality provides a foothold. This may be especially the case in some regions; in South Asia, over 80% of women in non-agricultural jobs work informally.²⁶That access matters for their financial well-being, but it comes at a cost. Informal workers are more vulnerable to wage theft, unsafe conditions, and the absence of any recourse if things go wrong.

Informality is not just a lower-income country problem. In higher-income countries like Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, more than a quarter of all employment remains informal; in Panama, this is nearly 6 in 10. Shrinking that share will require policies that extend legal protections and social safety nets to more workers—without dismantling the flexible arrangements that many workers, particularly women, depend on.

AI is reshaping work in real time, but its ultimate impact on jobs remains genuinely uncertain.²⁷ Because the technology is evolving so rapidly, even the most careful forecasts struggle to keep pace.²⁸

What is clear is that not all jobs face equal risk. Repetitive, rule-based work—clerical tasks, data entry, routine coding—has the highest AI exposure globally.²⁹ Manual work that requires physical presence and judgment, like cleaning, food preparation, and farming, is far less vulnerable.³⁰ That distinction matters enormously for which countries face the most disruption: Singapore and Luxembourg, where financial services roles are more common, face a higher AI exposure risk than countries that are more agrarian, such as Rwanda.

At the same time, historical precedent offers some caution against worst-case thinking. Past waves of automation displaced certain tasks without eliminating the workers who performed them—it changed what those workers did. Many researchers expect AI to follow a similar pattern, complementing human skills over the long-term rather than replacing them altogether.³¹ But it’s also possible this time is different, and the speed and breadth of AI’s capabilities make that a harder bet to take confidently.

The stakes are high either way. Countries that invest now in reskilling workers and adapting labor policy to an AI-shaped economy will be better positioned than those who wait for certainty that may never come.

Social protection programs—pensions, disability support, unemployment insurance, workplace injury coverage—can be the difference between a setback and a catastrophe for families.³² Most high-income countries have built robust systems. But coverage is far from universal, and the gaps fall hardest on those already most vulnerable.³³

Even among wealthy nations, the disparities can be stark. In Gulf states like Qatar and the UAE, just 4% and 3% of workers, respectively, have workplace injury protections—among the lowest rates in the world, and likely tied to those economies’ heavy reliance on migrant workers, who are routinely excluded from the protections extended to citizens.³⁴ Oman and Saudi Arabia, at 27% and 24%, fare only marginally better. Meanwhile, Germany, Guyana, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, and San Marino cover 100% of workers. The gap between these realities—within the same income bracket—is hard to overstate.

Within countries, programs are only as good as their reach. Women face particular barriers: Discriminatory laws limit their full employment in many places, and weak enforcement of protections compounds the problem.³⁵ Social protection programs that extend parental leave to both men and women don’t just fill a coverage gap—they actively challenge the expectation that caregiving is women’s work, with downstream effects for women’s economic participation.

Addressing these disparities isn’t only a matter of fairness. Workers with adequate protections are more economically stable, more productive, and better able to weather the disruptions—demographic, technological, and otherwise—that these charts describe.

History offers a humbling lesson about predicting the future of work: We are often wrong. No one in the mid-1990s foresaw that the internet would reinvent commerce and communication, or that it would spawn entire industries that didn’t yet exist. But within a decade, it had.³⁶ We are likely at a similar inflection point with AI—and while the full shape of that transformation remains unclear, the direction is not.

History also offers reassuring examples. When COVID-19 struck in 2020, lockdowns shuttered businesses overnight and sent shockwaves through the global labor force. Yet the disruption proved shorter-lived than many feared; prime-age workers saw only a brief, shallow dip in labor force participation before recovering. Work, it turned out, was more resilient than the crisis suggested.

That resilience is not guaranteed. The disruptions ahead, including AI, climate change, demographic shifts, geopolitical instability, are not short, sharp shocks but slow-moving structural forces that will reshape work over decades. The countries, employers, and workers best positioned to navigate them will be those who invest now: in skills, in protections, in policies flexible enough to weather a future that will not announce itself in advance.

Work will change—it always has. The difference this time is that we can see some of it coming and choose how to prepare.