Tag Archives: Economics and demography

Garden Of The Forking Paths?

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“Global imbalances matter” seems to be the favoured warcry over at Brad Setser’s blog these days (I’m not sure anyone really disagrees with the idea that they matter, all the arguing seems to be about how much and why). Recently however Brad seems to be drawing support from a rather unexpected quarter: “one part of the Economist” (well, one part is definitely better than none), the part which believes that despite what happened in 2005, 2006 will be the year of the “great dollar decline”: And why would this be? Because, of course, global imbalances do (here read the US CA deficit), in fact, matter.

Now there is another view available on this.

However this issue is more interesting, since the part of the Economist which believes that the US CA deficit will prove decisive in 2006, also seems to believe that global ageing isn’t in fact a terribly important phenomenon (and here).

The Economist seems to take the view – as Claus Vistesen puts it – that “Rich countries’ populations are shrinking … not to worry though“?

In fact Claus seems much nearer the mark than the part of the Economist which seems to be arguing that ageing doesn’t matter too much when he says:

I agree with the zest of their arguments, namely that the new realities mean that there will be fewer people in the workforce to support more old people in the future. In a global perpspective I also believe that the world would benefit from having fewer people on the whole. However, the point that escapes The Economist in the midst of their optimism is that some countries will have a hell of a lot more difficulties adapting than others, and as such these demographic trends might have a real negative effect, at least some places in the world.

Yes, I would say that this is just the point that escapes the ‘ageing doesn’t matter so much’ part of the Economist, who seem to believe that population meltdown in Japan wouldn’t be a problem since “the last Japanese will (only) die as soon as 2800.” (Actually the article on Japan is near to scandalous, since it only focuses on the legal minimum pensionable age, and misses entirely the important point that most Japanese already continue working after 65, and even by the age of 75 25% of the population are still working).

I have already posted extensively on the population turning point in Japan (and here). So now I would simply make two points. Firstly it is the age structure of the population which matters, not its size, and secondly, it is curious how all those people who seem to want to argue that the US current account deficit is the most important determinant of today’s global economy also feel themselves impelled to downplay (if not actually try to ridicule) the idea that changing global demography (from Bolivia, to Vietnam, to Turkey, to China, to France, to Germany, to Japan) has any important role to play in helping us understand current economic phenomena. I think there is a choice here: two world-views are colliding, and the paths are forking.

What A Surprise!

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According to the Financial Times this morning “Vietnam’s economy is expected to maintain rapid growth in the year ahead, after its gross domestic product last year expanded 8.45 per cent – the fastest pace of growth in nearly a decade.” This is to be added to the fact that “Economic growth in Vietnam, which averaged about 7 per cent between 2000 and 2004, has been driven in recent years largely by surging exports, after the signing of a long-anticipated bilateral trade agreement with the US in 2001”.

Now let’s take a quick look at the charts, yes, that’s it: median age 25.51, fertility 2.2 , life expectancy 70.61. The median age is still a little low for achieving complete take-off, but it is certainly in at the bottom end of the ‘new tigers’ range, and with fertility down to 2.2 and life expectancy already comparatively high, that median age looks set to rise rapidly.
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Getting Older, Or Getting Younger?

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Warren Sanderson & Sergei Scherbov had a very interesting article in Nature earlier this year (you can find the full article reproduced here on page 5). The article title really tells the story in itself: average remaining lifetimes can increase as human populations age. Put differently, we may be facing the interesting enigma that the longer we live, the longer we have left to live.

But, riddles aside, what Sanderson and Scherbov actually propose is a new metric: the median age of the population standardized for expected remaining years of life. Now why would that be interesting?
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Great Leap Forward II

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Updating on my post from yesterday, Dave Altig at MacroBlog reproduces a map (first posted by Sun Bin) of services as a component of GDP. As Dave points out China has clearly be come a significant outlier among would-be-developed economies in its reliance on manufacturing share. Even with the most recent data added in China is still very services-light. So: yes China needs financial reform, yes China needs to shift to a more domestic-consumption-driven model, and YES China needs to get into services, and bigtime.

The Great Leap Forward

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And this time it’s one that has been achieved in a little under 24 hours. China’s economy is now – officially speaking in any event – 17% bigger than it was yesterday. It will now be a neck and neck race for 4th place in the world economy league this year (the UK is the current holder) and a foregone conclusion next year.

Over the years a lot of people have suggested that China’s growth numbers were ‘rigged’, what they never contemplated howeveris that they may have been rigged downwards.

Also, as I noted here, China is now the world’s number one investment destination, and the number one exporter of ICT products.

Bo Malmberg and Evo Morales

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Bo Malmberg is a demographer and he works at the Stockholm-based Institute For Future Studies. Evo Morales is the ‘flamante’ President of Bolivia. OK, this much is clear, now where’s the connection?

Well, Brad Delong says of Morales’ election, citing Pyrrhus of Epirus, Another Such Victory and We Are Lost, while the Financial Times informs us that the result of the election is likely to cause consternation in the United States.

However, rather than allowing ourselves to fall victim to too much schadenfreude, maybe we would better employ our energies trying to understand why Morales is happening, and why right now. This is where Bo Malmberg comes in handy.
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The Pébereau Report

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According to the French writer Rabelais debt and deceipt are almost invariably inextricably linked. So it is appropriate that it should be a French banker – Michel Pébereau – who takes it upon himself to try to bring this harsh reality home to a French public which still seems excessively steeped in the finer details of the arts of self-deception. Pébereau does not mince words: over a quarter of a century century French public policy has accumulated for itself a national debt has neither supported economic growth nor reduced unemployment. The debt is “asphyxiating” and unless the State acts to reduce its spending now France will “lose control of the financial situation” before the end of the decade. Indeed so stark is the picture Pébereau paints that French economy minister Thierry Breton, on reading the report, was moved to comment: “Unbeknownst to them, our children are already financing part of our standard of living.”
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Wolfgang Lutz and the Low Fertility Trap

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Back in July I published a post about Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz’s hypothesis that those countries which sustain total fertility rates below 1.5 for any length of time may have fallen into a self-reinforcing low-fertility trap. Old Rottenhat (Ray to his friends) argued in comments that I had explained the reasons for the existence of low fertility but that I had not justified the idea that this was a ‘trap’. Old Rottenhat was right, and taking advantage of the fact that Lutz himself has now given a fuller outline of the hypothesis at the recent Postponement of Childbearing in Europe Conference (see presentation) I will now try and remedy this lacuna.

So here finally Ray, is your reply: I hope it is something which indeed goes beyond the obvious.
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The Postponement of Childbirth in Europe

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At the present time some 66 countries have fertility rates which are below the level necessary for population replacement (TFR 2.1). Within the next decade the number of counries in this group is set to grow to the point where a majority of the world’s population will be living in regions where the existing population no longer replaces itself. This development in an of itself is no disaster – many countries arguably suffer from excessive rates of population increase – but equally reducing fertility too rapidly can lead to economic and social ‘imbalances’ that may well turn out to be, in and of themselves, ‘undesireable’.

Understanding why this is happening has begun to present an important challenge for many areas in contemporary social science as there are evidently factors involved in the process which embrace areas as diverse as demography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, economics and of course biology.

One of the characteristic features of this most recent fertility decline is that it is driven largely by a delay in childbearing: couples (and obviously in particular this means women) wait longer and longer before taking the decision to have a child. Understanding the dynamics behind this ‘delay syndrome’ is the key to developing a social policy to address the consequences, so it is particularly timely that the Vienna Institute of Demography was host last week to a Conference on this very topic: The Postponement of Childbearing In Europe. A number of interesting and important papers were presented, and I will be looking at a number of them between now and xmas. Indeed I have opened a page on my website which will be dedicated to the Conference.

But, just as a taster, why is postponment so important?
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