The Role of Socio-Demographics and Aging Society on the Change of Agricultural Labor in ASEAN

Agriculture has been an essential driver of economic development in many countries worldwide. However, the share of agricultural labor has continued to fall in many countries. This brings new challenges to global food security. The decline in the number of agricultural workers affects production and the economy in various ways. This study aims at identifying the factors able to enhance the number of agricultural workers in ASEAN countries in order to sustain the food security in the future. Various socio-demographic factors and aging society are considered in our analysis. The panel regression model with five estimations is used in our research. The result shows that Lasso performs the best fit estimator for the panel regression model. Our results confirm that elderly workers still remain the sources of low labor productivity in the ASEAN countries. Our confirmation leads to several policy recommendations. First, as we can see from the results, the large number of tertiary educated persons in the labor force has a negative impact on the number of agricultural workers. We also suggest the government to support the transfer of appropriate technology to the low-skilled labors and elderly people and also reskill them. Although the roles of reskill and technology takes time to reap benefit, the efforts have proved significant in raising the productivity.