16. Draws the attention of the Member States and the Commission to the fact that after 2020, even though there will be fewer and fewer people of working age, active inclusion policies will nonetheless be needed for these people, and that there will be ever-greater competition for jobs, while the private sector will provide fewer and fewer jobs for those who are currently relatively low-skilled; recalls that even in some of the most affluent Member States (e.g. Denmark and Luxembourg), long-term unemployment is increasing alarming (nearly 12 million people in the EU are classified as long-term unemployed, representing 5 % of the workforc ...[+++]e, and 59 % of them have been out of work for two years); calls on the Commission, in cooperation with the Member States, to seek practical, bridging employment solutions for particularly low-skilled and unskilled workers and/or to help them find work again, which will necessitate a new approach, together with not only long-term strategies but also short-term measures, such as forms of income support, to prevent the social exclusion of the most disadvantaged groups, and the adjustment of existing tools such as the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the ESF in order to prevent permanent long-term unemployment, a recurrence of the recent population outflow towards more developed regions, in particular of people above the age of 50 and young people, and a lasting increase in that outflow; calls on the Commission to measure the accessibility of private-sector jobs for particularly low-skilled workers, and to establish which new jobs not requiring any qualifications could be created in the short term until 2020;

Australia, Canada, the United States and even Switzerland have a higher proportion of highly qualified workers in their workforces.

32. Welcomes the follow-up to the 2005 Green Paper on demographic trends in the EU and expects the Commission's proposals for concrete actions to contribute to tackling Europe's demographic ageing problem, given that the working population will fall by nearly 21 million within the next 20 years; attaches particular importance to increasing active participation in the job market by people of working age, with a view to achieving the Lisbon objective of a participation rate of 70% in 2010;

32. Welcomes the follow-up to the 2005 Green Paper on demographic trends in the EU and expects the Commission's proposals for concrete actions to contribute to tackling Europe's demographic ageing problem, given that the working population will fall by nearly 21 million within the next 20 years; attaches particular importance to increasing active participation in the job market by people of working age, with a view to achieving the Lisbon objective of a participation rate of 70% in 2010;

Several measures, such as increasing the retirement age of an ever healthier population and thus increasing the size of the active workforce, are a crucial step in improving the ratio between the active working population and retired persons.

Currently, the economic dependency ratio (people aged 20 and over not in work as a proportion of total employed) is 0,86 in the European Union, which means that there are nearly as many working-age people who are not in work as people who are.