The labor input gap had already turned positive by October–December 2013. This reflects a continuous decline in average labor input, which was caused by a decrease in the number of employed people and labor hours. This trend has been augmented since 2012 by the retirement of the baby boomer generation reaching 65 years old.
Since we are not active in the market, there is no relevance in this context to the question of how large our foreign-currency reserves are. BIS Review 34/2001  b.