Samenvatting

The contraction of the labour force evokes both promising and gloomy prospects. Promising, because unemployment is expected to be a thing of the past, gloomy, because a shortage of labour could endanger our future prosperity. This article shows that both prospects are wrongfully based on a static perspective of the labour market, which neglects the underlying dynamics. Since the demand and the supply of labour adjust to one another, the future labour market will not be completely different from the present one. Moreover, the ageing of the labour force has nearly reached its apogee and the age composition of the labour force will not change much in the next 25 years. Thus, the problems of a contracting labour market will be remarkably similar to the problems of the expanding labour market of the past decades.