Fully 43% of the workforce is eligible to retire in the next 10 years, and the next two generations are each at least 15% smaller.
So if Baby Boomers retire on schedule, many companies will experience labor shortfalls. 
The crunch will come in businesses that are already scrambling for skilled employees, such as energy, health care and education. In Europe and Japan, where younger workers are in even shorter supply, the pressure will be worse. Unless something is done, wages in the worker-starved advanced industrial nations could rise to uncompetitive levels, and more of the world's goods and services will move to the developing world--leading to even more dangerously lopsided imbalances in trade and finance than exist today.
Changes in pension and tax laws are required so that business can more easily establish phased retirement programs that permit older employees to draw funds from their pension plans while continuing to work.
In just a few years, the aging workforce in the U.S. and abroad will become a central societal problem. But there's no reason why it can't be turned into an opportunity as well.
Source: BusinessWeek, November 14, 2005, by Jeffrey E. Garten who is the Juan Trippe professor at The Yale School of Management
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