working-age population

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

As for how fast the working-age population needs to grow to raise the likelihood of an economic boom, it turns out 2 percent is a good benchmark. In three out of four of the miracle economies, the working-age population grew at an average pace of at least 2 percent a year during the full duration of a decade-long boom. A country is thus unlikely to experience a decade-long growth boom if its working-age population is growing at a rate less than 2 percent. And one striking change in the post-crisis world is that there are now very few countries with a population growing that fast. As recently as the 1980s, seventeen of the twenty largest emerging economies had a working-age population growth rate above 2 percent, but that number has fallen steadily from seventeen to only two in the 2010s, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.

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This does not bode well for the emerging world, where more and more countries face the prospect of weak or even negative population growth. Over the course of the 2010s, all the major emerging economies are projected to have working-age population growth rates below the 2 percent mark, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and Thailand. Already the working-age population is actively contracting in three large emerging countries: Poland, Russia, and most important, China. There the working-age population growth rate hovered under 2 percent as recently as 2003, then dropped steadily until it turned negative for the first time in 2015. Population decline is now high on the list of reasons, alongside its heavy debts and excessive investments, to doubt that China can sustain rapid GDP growth.

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The first part of the rule for finding the answer is to look at the projected growth of the working-age population over the next five years, because workers (more than retirees or schoolchildren) are the drivers of growth. The second part of the rule is to look at what nations are doing to counteract slower population growth. One way is to try to inspire women to have more babies, an approach with a spotty record at best. The other is to attract adults—including retirees, women, and economic migrants—to enter or reenter the active labor force. The big winners will come from among those countries that are blessed with strong growth in the working-age population or are doing the best job of bringing fresh talent into the labor force.

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing
by Niels Jensen
Published 25 Mar 2018

Having said that, I think most would agree that, in these digital times, GDP is a terrible measure of living standards whatever way it is calculated. * * * 82 Defined by the UN as the ratio of female to male proportion of a country’s working-age population that engages in the labour market, either by working or actively looking for work, expressed as a percentage of the working-age population. 83 Source: United Nations (2016). 84 The Danish government is pushing ahead with plans to change the mandatory retirement age and have run into massive resistance. 85 Source: The MacroStrategy Partnership LLP (2017,4). 86 Source: IEA (2016). 87 BofAML (2015). 88 Source: The MacroStrategy Partnership LLP (2017,5).

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This would obviously be a rather dramatic U-turn on his declared policy on immigration, but low or no immigration would most likely be massively damaging to economic growth. Exhibit 11.1: Change in US working age population (those aged 25–64) in % 1965–74 1975–84 1985–94 1995–04 2005–14 2015–24 2025–35 Immigrants 1.0 3.8 6.9 10.8 6.1 3.5 1.2 U.S. born with immigrant parents −2.5 −3.1 −1.8 0.3 2.4 5.7 7.9 U.S. born with U.S. born parents 13.3 20.0 15.1 10.6 4.8 −4.3 −3.8 Source: Pew Research Center (2017). Pew Research Center’s projections suggest that 17.6 million new immigrants will be added to the US working-age population by 2035. Without them, the number of working-age immigrants would decline by 2035, and the total US working-age population would drop by almost 8 million (or more than 4%) from 2015 levels.

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Moody’s (2017) www.moodys.com/research/Moodys-Passive-investing-to-overtake-active-in-just-four-to--PR_361541 OECD (2015) The Labour Share in G20 Economies, OECD Publishing. OECD (2016) OECD Pensions Outlook 2016, OECD Publishing. Pew Research Center (2017) Immigration Projected to Drive Growth in U.S. Working-Age Population Through at Least 2035, Pew Research Center, Washington DC (Mach 2017), © 2017. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/immigration-projected-to-drive-growth-in-u-s-working-age-population-through-at-least-2035/ PhaseCapital (2015) The Case for Dynamic Diversification. Preqin (2017) Does Fund Size Affect Hedge Fund Performance? Research Affiliates (2013) Mind the (Expectations) Gap.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Published 8 Aug 2020

12 A Switch from Debt to Equity Finance? 13 Future Policy Problems: Old Age and Taxes, and the Monetary-Fiscal Clash 14 Swimming Against the (Main)Stream Postscript: Future Imperfect After Coronavirus References Index List of Diagrams Diagram 1.1 An ageing world: working age population (Mil) is falling; working age population growth (yearly increase) is slowing Diagram 1.2 Trade union density has been falling for decades now Diagram 1.3 Advanced economies inflation: Durable goods and services (year on year = %Y, averaged over 3 years = 3Yr Ave) Diagram 1.4 Advanced economies public debt (% of Gross Domestic Product) is going to rise even further Diagram 1.5 Long-term government bond yields: 10-year maturity Diagram 1.6 The number of people with dementia (per 1000 population, all ages) will rise sharply across the advanced economies Diagram 1.7 Labour share of income in advanced economies Diagram 1.8 US federal debt held by the public was projected to rise sharply even before the pandemic Diagram 1.9 Projections of UK public sector net debt Diagram 2.1 Reforms and exports have led to sustained surges in growth Diagram 2.2 “The surprisingly swift decline in US manufacturing employment” Diagram 2.3 China credit growth surged in the early 90s and after the Great Financial Crisis Diagram 2.4 Capital inflows were offset at the border, leading to huge foreign exchange reserves Diagram 2.5 China’s working age population is shrinking; Urban population is now 60% of the total Diagram 2.6 Like Japan, China will see a mathematical rebalancing Diagram 3.1 Fertility (children per woman) is falling sharply in the EMEs, having already fallen in the AEs Diagram 3.2 Life expectancy at birth (years) is rising globally Diagram 3.3 Dependency ratios rising in the AEs, mixed among the EMEs (per 100) Diagram 3.4 Life expectancy (in years) and the geographical distribution of the demographic dividend Diagram 3.5 Dependency ratio (per 100) in the different demographic cycles, % of world population Diagram 3.6 Gross domestic product contributions (% of global) in the different demographic cycles Diagram 3.7 Participation rate (% of population) has already risen sharply in the 55–64 year cohort in the AEs Diagram 3.8 Pension repayment rate and the participation rate are inversely correlated Diagram 3.9 Effective retirement age (years) has risen by less than life expectancy Diagram 4.1 As people live longer, the burden of dementia is bound to increase Diagram 4.2 Public spending on long-term care varies among rich nations Diagram 4.3 UK: Average age of parents at the birth of their child Diagram 4.4 Mean Age of Women at the Birth of their First Child (Age) Diagram 5.1 The household savings rate falls as the dependency ratio worsens Diagram 5.2 Proportion of population aged over 65 Diagram 5.3 Older people less likely to move in the United States Diagram 5.4 And in the United Kingdom, too Diagram 5.5 UK: average age of parents at the birth of their child (age) Diagram 5.6 Mean age of women at the birth of first child (age) has risen across the AEs Diagram 5.7 The profit share of gross domestic product has been rising, particularly after the GFC Diagram 5.8 Gross fixed capital formation (as a % of gross domestic product) has been stagnant in the AEs, but not in China Diagram 5.9 Corporate sector net saving (% of gross domestic product) will move further into deficit Diagram 5.10 General government budget balances (shown here as a % of GDP) have been in deficit persistently Diagram 6.1 Consumption rises over the life cycle Diagram 6.2 Health expenditure rising globally, mostly due to high income economies Diagram 6.3 Public expenditures on pensions will continue to rise Diagram 6.4 Life expectancy less effective retirement age is rising across the AEs Diagram 6.5 Wedge (spread) between yields on corporate AAA bonds and on BBB bonds Diagram 7.1 Gini coefficient of disposable household income across the OECD Diagram 7.2 Fiscal redistributive impact is still large but declining in some OECD countries Diagram 7.3 Cumulative change in real weekly earnings of working age adults aged 18–64, 1963–2017 Diagram 7.4 Changes in occupational employment shares among working age adults, 1980–2016 Diagram 7.5 Ratio of remuneration between CEOs and average workers in world in 2014, by country Diagram 7.6 Median cash incentive payments for FTSE 100 lead executives 1996–2013 Diagram 8.1 Keynesian reverse-L supply curve Diagram 8.2 Achieving the political optimum on the Phillips curve Diagram 8.3 Stagflation in advanced economies Diagram 8.4 Trade union density has been falling since around 1980 Diagram 8.5 The horizontal Phillips curve, 2006–2018 Diagram 8.6 Working days lost to strikes (Mil.); Work stoppage workers involved (Mil.)

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The integration of China into the global manufacturing complex by itself more than doubled the available labour supply for the production of tradeable products among the advanced economies (AEs). So we start the rest of this book with a Chapter on China, Chapter 2. The increase in the working age population (WAP, aged 15–64) in China outstripped the combined increase in Europe and the USA from 1990 to 2017 over fourfold—China saw an increase of over 240 million while in the latter two WAP increased by less than 60 million and mostly in the USA. The participation of the working age population also tilted the scales heavily in China’s favour. On the one hand, workers migrated aggressively from rural to urban China—the latter’s share of total population increased by over 23 percentage points (pp hereafter), or 370 million between 2000 and 2017.

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At the same time, a number of social and economic developments raised the proportion of women working in the labour force (Table 1.2, USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan).Table 1.1Percentage of young and retirees in the population USA UK Germany Japan China Young 1970 28 24 23 24 40 2010 20 17 14 13 19 Change 1970–2010: −8 −7 −9 −11 −21 2010 20 17 14 13 19 2019 19 18 14 13 18 Change 2010–2019: −1 1 0 0 −1 Retiree 1970 10 13 24 7 4 2010 13 17 21 22 8 Change 1970–2010: 3 4 3 15 4 2010 13 17 21 22 8 2019 16 19 22 28 11 Change 2010–2019: 3 2 1 6 3 Source UN Population Statistics Table 1.2Participation of women in the labour force USA UK Germany France Japan 1990 56.2 52.0 45.2 46.3 50.1 2010 57.5 55.5 52.8 50.9 48.7 2019 55.8 57.1 55.3 50.2 51.4 Change: 1990–2019 −0.4 5.1 10.0 3.9 1.3 Source World Bank Combining these two factors, the rise of China, globalisation and the reincorporation of Eastern Europe into the world trading system, together with the demographic forces, the arrival of the baby boomers into the labour force and the improvement in the dependency ratio, together with greater women’s employment, produced the largest ever, massive positive labour supply shock. The effective labour supply force for the world’s advanced economy trading system more than doubled over these 27 years, from 1991 to 2018 (Diagram 1.1). Diagram 1.1An ageing world: working age population (Mil) is falling; working age population growth (yearly increase) is slowing (Source UN Population Statistics) 1.1.4 The Economic Effects Have Been Dramatic The last 30 odd years from the beginning of the 1990s to the present have been extraordinary for the global economy (Chapter 3). When such a positive supply shock to labour occurs, the inevitable result is a weakening in the bargaining power of the labour force.

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020

Without migration, its working-age population is set to fall by nearly ten million people – 18 percent – between 2020 and 2040. If it admitted half a million young migrant workers a year for the next twenty years, the working-age population would remain stable at 54 million. This would make it much easier to support the increase in the retirement-age population from 18 million to 24 million. Or consider the UK. Without migration, its working-age population is set to fall by 2.3 million by 2040. If it admitted 200,000 young migrant workers a year over the next two decades, the working-age population would edge up by 1.7 million to 41 million.

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As a result, shrinking working-age populations have increasing numbers of pensioners to support. Migrants offset that; four-fifths of those in OECD countries are of working age.37 Without migration, the working-age population would already be falling in both Europe and North America. Without further migration, that decline would accelerate in coming decades. The EU’s population aged fifteen to sixty-four would fall by 45 million people between 2020 and 2040 – a 14 percent decline.38 The UK’s would decline by 5.5 percent over the same period, the US’s by 4 percent.39 While the working-age population is set to shrink, the population aged sixty-five and older is swelling.

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They found that an influx of low-skilled refugees, who mostly did not speak Danish and filled elementary and manual labour positions, caused unskilled and low-skilled locals to shift towards more complex, higher-skilled, non-manual work, thereby boosting their wages, employment and occupational mobility.33 Peri and Foged argue that an influx of low-skilled newcomers ought to have a similarly positive impact in other economies with a flexible labour market, such as the US and the UK. Flexible labour markets can adjust rapidly to even very large inflows of people. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 710,000 Russian Jews emigrated to Israel, increasing its working-age population by over 15 percent in seven years. While they weren’t strictly speaking refugees, they were admitted for political reasons – because Jews everywhere have an automatic right to settle in Israel – not economic ones. While many were skilled, they had no experience of a capitalist economy and most spoke no Hebrew.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White
Published 24 Oct 2016

So, too, the structural reforms imposed on Greece and Spain and the other crisis countries were supposed to increase productivity. Because working-age populations (ages 15 to 64) in different countries have grown at different rates—Japan’s working-age population has been shrinking at the rate of around 1 percent a year while the United States’ has been increasing at 0.7 percent a year, and Germany’s has been decreasing at 0.3 percent a year12—it is perhaps more meaningful to compare real (inflation-adjusted) growth per person of working-age GDP than just GDP. One expects Japan’s growth to be lower than that of the United States’, simply because there are fewer workers. If Japan’s growth per working-age population is higher, it tells us something important: it is either finding more jobs for those of working age or it is increasing their productivity.

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This likely changed, of course, as Greece became the main recipient of refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the last couple of years, though this is a different kind of migration altogether—refugees choose Greece as a gateway to Europe and not because it is the most attractive destination for settlement. 10 Greece’s working-age population as percentage of total population fell from 66.7 percent in 2007 to 64.6 percent in 2015. Thus, the share of the declining population that was of working-age population decreased by more than 2 percentage points. Even if the unemployment rate had been unchanged and even if productivity had remained the same, GDP on this account alone would have fallen by more than 4 percent, reducing the country’s ability to pay back its debts. 11 Government expenditure converted to real terms using GDP deflator using IMF data. 12 World Bank data. 13 Eurostat data. 14 And well below that of the much maligned Japan, whose real GDP per working age population exceeds by a considerable amount both Europe and the United States.

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The eurozone has not been doing well when viewed from this perspective—for the eurozone as a whole, GDP per working-age person has increased by just 0.6 percent during 2007–2015, while for non-eurozone European countries, there has been a 3.9 percent increase.13 The comparison with the United States looks even more unfavorable: while by 2011, US growth in GDP per working-age population had largely returned to precrisis levels, the eurozone area’s number was markedly below—in fact, well below not only that of the United States but of the world and high-income countries.14 In the crisis countries, performance has predictably been even worse. If there has been any increase in productivity, that effect has been overwhelmed by the increase in unemployment.

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife
by Marc Freedman
Published 15 Dec 2011

The article contains statements like this one: “As workers born during the baby boom of 1945–1965 are retiring they are not being replaced by a new cohort of citizens of prime working age (15–59 years old). Industrialized countries are experiencing a drop in their working age populations.” Or this assertion, “By 2050, in other words, the entire working-age population will barely exceed the 60-andolder population.” To be fair, Goldstone goes on to suggest that policy makers take advantage of the longevity bonus and make it easier for individuals to work beyond sixty. Still, the notion that the “prime working years” are fifteen to fifty-nine and that sixty and beyond are no longer the “working years” leads to great distortions.

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One sees these kinds of predictions littered throughout the popular press and the pundit ranks where the “aging of the boomers,” the “retirement of the boomers,” and various predictions of population bombs, silver tsunamis, gray quakes, and other longevity- and demography-born disasters are repeated as fact because at one time in history sixty-year-olds were a prime market for walkers. A stock in trade of this thinking is the dependency ratio, built on anachronistic ideas like a working-age population that’s fifteen to fifty-nine or sixty-five and notions of “retirement age” that simply no longer apply. Demographers likewise talk in grave tones about the “elder share,” the segment of a nation’s population over sixty, using this share as a marker of how decrepit the population is. It’s no surprise that these books and essays are usually overcome with lament for America’s lost youth, including much mourning about how the future will be far worse than our past, as we head over the hill as a nation.

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When Social Security was enacted, Americans moving beyond sixty-five were considered “beyond the productive period,” based on mortality risk. Just as we’d never consider equating 1935 dollars with 2010 dollars, should we expect 1935 ages to mean the same thing as those same indicators three-quarters of a century later? We need to longevity-adjust the meaning of ideas like the working-age population, just as we inflation-adjust currencies, in Shoven’s compelling perspective. Shoven’s Stanford colleague, Center on Longevity founder Laura Carstensen, registers a companion point: All those years that have been added to life spans haven’t simply been tacked onto the end. They have been contributed to the middle—mostly to the second half of life where health and capacity after fifty are being dramatically stretched.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy
by George Magnus
Published 10 Sep 2018

Household savings rose from about 5 per cent of disposable income in the late 1970s to about 38 per cent in 2016, or just over 25 per cent of GDP. Savings by companies are also elevated, amounting to about 17 per cent of GDP in 2016. High household savings reflect China’s demographics, the rise in the working-age population, and the continuing weaknesses in the social security system. An inadequate level of social welfare is a problem specifically for China’s 150 million or so internal migrants without ‘hukou’, or urban registration. They are denied access to a wide range of public housing, education and social services and benefits.

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Support for the consumer sector could be strengthened by creating new jobs in services and building up the social security and healthcare coverage safety nets. Such policies would most likely help to lower household savings, accelerating a change that will probably happen anyway over time as China ages. The working-age population is now in decline, and the old-age dependency ratio is predicted to double between 2017 and 2030. Social benefits should rise and be extended to all working people and their families. The growth in services should be actively encouraged, both in megacities such as Beijing or Shanghai, which are already well -served, but also and importantly in other cities, especially those inland, which are not.28 Modern service industries, which remain relatively closed, could be deregulated and opened up, for example in a wide range of communication, professional, business, entertainment and information services.

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In fact, while rising life expectancy is self-evidently something we do both celebrate and worry about when it comes to care, it isn’t actually the core issue in ageing. Rather, it is low fertility. Low fertility means we don’t produce enough children to become workers to fully replace those reaching retirement. As a result, the size and the growth rate of the working-age population (WAP), typically defined as those aged fifteen to sixty-four, are going to stagnate or decline. Low or falling fertility is pretty much a global issue. In Denmark, France, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Spain, cash or other incentives have been tried to get women to have more children.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century
by Torben Iversen and David Soskice
Published 5 Feb 2019

Singapore has only slowly moved in a fully democratic direction, but its commitment to education and open trade has been unwavering; it is in fact the only advanced country that is (still) not fully democratic. FIGURE 1.2. Number of patents per one million people (logged) in the working-age population, 2015 vs. 1976. The data are from the US Patent and Trademark Office and show the total number of patents granted as a share of working-age population in millions, by the country of residence of the inventor. Countries all the way to the left received zero patents in 1976 and have been assigned an arbitrarily low value (since numbers are logged). Source: OECD.Stat.

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Since Switzerland has a collective executive that is not the result of coalition bargaining, we exclude it from the analysis. It has no effect on the substantive results. Chapter 3: Appendix 1. These controls are only relevant for total spending because unemployment and ALMPs only apply to the working-age population. 2. Automatic unemployment disbursement is defined as the first difference in unemployment as a percent of the working-age population times the net replacement rate in the previous year, which is the ratio of net unemployment insurance benefits to net income for an unmarried single person earning the average production worker’s wage. Chapter 4: Knowledge Economies and Their Political Construction 1.

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Factor Analysis with Varimax Rotation (Numbers Are Eigenvalues) 254 A5.2. Individual Level Regression Results 255 A5.3. The Determinants of Populist Voting in Six Countries with Significant Populist Parties 256 Figures 1.1 Measures of Distribution of Income, 2010 vs. 1985 24 1.2 Number of Patents per One Million People in the Working Age Population 27 1.3 The Distribution of Income in Advanced Democracies Compared to Nonadvanced Countries 36 2.1 Protocorporatist States and Industrial Relations Structuring 70 3.1 Average Union Density Rates and Wage Coordination in 18 Advanced Democracies 106 3.2 Average Density and Collective Bargaining Coordination in Four Advanced Democracies 107 3.3 The Vote Shares of Social Democratic and Center Parties 116 3.4 Male Wage Inequality 118 3.5 Average Industrial Employment as a Share of Total Civilian Employment in 18 Advanced Democracies 119 3.6 Central Bank Independence in 18 OECD Countries 122 3.7 The Responsiveness of Governments to Adverse Shocks in Different Political Systems 126 3.8 Voter Support for Populist Parties 130 4.1 Percent with Tertiary Degrees, by Age Group 147 4.2 Capital Market Openness and the Stock of FDI in Advanced Democracies 148 4.3 Financialization of Advanced Economies 150 4.4 Inflation Rates before and after Adoption of Inflation Targeting 153 4.5 The Strengthening of Product Market Competition Policies in ACDs 154 4.6 Number and Depth of Trade Agreements 155 4.7 A Strategic Complementarities Game of Reforms 162 4.8 Support for Government Intervention in Economy, by Policy Area 166 4.9 Summary of Causal Linkages in Big-City Agglomerations 200 5.1 The Great Gatsby Curve 221 5.2 The Link between the Transition to the Knowledge Economy and Populism 227 5.3 The Difference in Populist Values between the Old and New Middle Class 240 5.4 Educational Opportunity and Populist Values 242 5.5 The Rise of Populist Voting 245 5.6 The Difference in Populist Vote between the Old and New Middle Class 247 6.1 The Symbiotic Relationship 259 PREFACE This book started from our discussions of a paradox.

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future
by Ian Goldin , Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan
Published 20 Dec 2010

It may still be too early to judge the full implications of this growing phenomenon, but higher educational attainment and the availability of employment prospects overseas give this population of university-educated young adults a greater propensity for migration. Many developing countries will be experiencing a “youth bulge” in the coming decades, and the growth in working-age populations will contribute to greater migration pressure. Growing Working-Age populations in Developing countries In forecasting future population trends, the concept of the “demographic transition” can explain why the age distribution within nations and regions changes over time. The demographic transition is the movement of a country—over several decades—from a pattern of high mortality and high fertility to one of low mortality and low fertility.

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Comparing the educational attainment of migrant fathers and their children in Canada, by source region, 2008 Figure 7.1. Falling tariffs in three regions, 1950-2000 Figure 7.2. Gini coefficient: Unweighted intercountry inequality, 1950-1998 Figure 7.3. Percentage of regional and world populations living in cities, 1950-2050 Figure 7.4. Long-term trend in size of the working-age population in sub-Saharan Africa by level of educational attainment, 1970-2050 Figure 7.5. Population aged 15-64, medium variant projections, 1950-2050 Figure 7.6. Population growth and age distribution in South Africa and Nigeria Figure 7.7. Total fertility rates (average number of children per woman), medium variant projections, 1950-2050 Figure 7.8.

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We highlight six interrelated factors that can be expected to foster a growing supply of potential migrants: persistent intercountry inequality and wage disparities; economic growth in the poorest countries; rural displacement and urbanization; rising education standards in developing countries; growing working-age populations in developing countries; and environmental stress. These factors, in themselves, will not launch people over borders to seek their fortune in distant lands, primarily because migration is still heavily influenced by national regulatory regimes. Given the opportunity, however, more and more people will be prepared to assume the risks and costs of migration.

The Economics of Inequality
by Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer
Published 7 Jan 2015

In 1995, 1.5 million individuals were incarcerated in US prisons, compared with 500,000 in 1980; it is estimated that 2.4 million will be incarcerated in 2000 (Freeman, 1996). This aspect of underemployment, entirely neglected in official unemployment statistics, is not a minor matter, since these 1.5 million prisoners represented 1.5 percent of the US working age population in 1995. In France, by comparison, the prison population was just 60,000, or 0.3 percent of the working age population. It would of course be simplistic to suggest that the growth of crime in the United States since 1970 can be explained entirely by the evolution of wage inequality. Clearly, however, it was more difficult to be a model proletarian in the United States in 1995 than it was in 1970, given that the wage of the tenth centile fell by nearly 50 percent compared with that of the ninetieth centile.

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Official figures might seem to support this view: the 1996 unemployment rate was 5.6 percent in the United States and 7.5 percent (and rapidly declining) in the United Kingdom, compared with 10.3 percent in Germany, 12.1 percent in Italy, and 12.2 percent in France (where 3 million people were unemployed in a working-age population of around 25 million [OECD, 1996, A24]). High growth in the late 1990s significantly reduced unemployment everywhere but left the geographical variation intact: in 2000, the unemployment rate was 4 percent in the United States and 10 percent in France (OECD, 2000). The problem with this type of comparison, however, is that the notion of unemployment is not an adequate measure of the phenomenon of underemployment.

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It is therefore tempting to conclude that underemployment is in fact as high in the United States as in the European countries where unemployment is high. This is misleading, however, since the phenomenon of hidden underemployment is unfortunately not limited to the United States. It takes other forms in Europe, less visible perhaps but no less significant. Consider, for example, the fact that only 67 percent of the working age population is classified as belonging to the active population in France in 1996, compared with 77 percent in the United States, 75 percent in the United Kingdom, and only 68 percent in Germany and 60 percent in Italy (OECD, 1996, A22). This indicator, known as the labor market participation rate, is highly imperfect because it mixes together a wide range of phenomena, such as the female participation rate and the percentage of early retirees, but it nevertheless points to a real problem.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

There are some people who are too young or too old to work. So we consider only the working-age population when we calculate unemployment. All countries exclude children from the working-age population, but the definition of children differs across countries; fifteen is the most frequently used threshold, but it could be as low as five (India and Nepal).10 Some countries also exclude old people from the working-age population; the most frequently used threshold ages are sixty-four and seventy-four, but it could be as low as sixty-three or as high as seventy-nine. Even among those who belong to the working-age population, not everyone who is not working is counted as unemployed.

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Some of them, such as students or those who are engaged in unpaid household work or care work for their family or friends, may not want a paid job. In order to be classified as unemployed, the person should have been ‘actively seeking work’, which is defined as having applied for paid jobs in the recent past – usually in the preceding four weeks. When you subtract those who are not actively seeking work from your working-age population, you get the economically active population. Only those who are economically active (that is, actively seeking paid jobs) but are not working are counted as unemployed. This definition of unemployment, known as the ILO definition, is used by all countries (with minor modifications), but is not without serious problems.

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Their employment is often not recognized in the official employment/unemployment statistics. 11. In order to deal with the difficulties created by discouraged workers, economists sometimes look at the labour force participation rate, which is the share of the economically active population (the employed and the officially unemployed) in the working-age population. A sudden fall in that rate is likely to indicate that there has been an increase in the number of discouraged workers, who are not counted as unemployed any more. CHAPTER 11: LEVIATHAN OR THE PHILOSOPHER KING?: THE ROLE OF THE STATE 1. Some economists, including myself, go even further and argue that, in industries that require large capital investments for productivity growth (e.g., steel, automobile), ‘anti-competitive’ arrangements among oligopolistic firms – such as cartels – can be socially useful.

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success
by Dietrich Vollrath
Published 6 Jan 2020

The solid line near the top of the graph shows the number of kids, age 0–20, as a percentage of the total number of working-age people, age 20–64. The effect of the baby boom is visible around 1960, as the number of kids exploded to equal almost 80% of the working-age population. At the same time, the old-age dependency ratio, which is the number of people 65 and older as a percentage of the working-age population, was less than 20%. From 1960 to almost 2010, as fertility declined so did the youth dependency ratio. It is now around 45%, almost half its peak in 1960. And for much of that same period, the old-age dependency ratio also stayed constant at around 20%.

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This means that the proportion of workers to total population, which had already begun to drop because of the rise in the old-age dependency ratio in the early 2000s, will continue to fall. Figure 5.3. Dependency ratios over time Note: Data is from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development population statistics database. Youth dependency is the ratio of people age 0–20 to the working-age population, 20–64. Old-age dependency is the ratio of those age 65 and older to the working-age population, 20–64. I attributed this all to a decline in fertility, but of course changes to mortality rates have played a role as well. In 1960, life expectancy in the United States was roughly age 70, but by 2015 it had reached age 79. Life expectancy works a lot like total fertility rate, in that it captures a snapshot of the mortality rates acting on people of different ages in a given year.

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After that, it rose again, reaching just over 43 in 2010, and it will probably increase a little further by 2020. These do not look like monumental changes, but we can see something a little more dramatic if we consider the distribution of workers by age in more detail. In 1960, about 36% of the working-age population was between 20 and 34 years of age. By 1980, that share rose to 46%, but by 2010 it was back down to 34%. For several decades in the late twentieth century, the US economy had a relatively young and inexperienced workforce, compared to both the twenty-first century and the period not long after World War II.

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States
by Bernadette Hanlon
Published 18 Dec 2009

In the case of the Midwest, on average, half the population of these suburbs was non-Hispanic black in 1980, increasing to almost 70 percent by 2000. Declining Inner-Ring Suburbs / 75 TABLE 6.3 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS FOR HIGH-POVERTY INNER-RING SUBURBS Average percentage Population that was in poverty, 1980 Population that was in poverty, 2000 Working-age population that was not in the labor force, 1980 Working-age population that was not in the labor force, 2000 Working-age population that was unemployed, 1980 Working-age population that was unemployed, 2000 Northeast Midwest South West 20 26 22 31 18 27 20 27 47 44 38 39 46 45 43 45 11 19 9 17 10 15 11 12 Workers who were in manufacturing, 1980 Workers who were in manufacturing, 2000 34 15 30 17 15 11 33 21 Population that was white, 1980 Population that was white, 2000 71 49 41 25 55 25 34 14 Population that was black, 1980 Population that was black, 2000 19 31 57 69 32 47 20 14 Population that was other, 1980 Population that was other, 2000 1 4 1 3 1 3 4 7 Population that was Hispanic, 1980 Population that was Hispanic, 2000 8 17 2 3 12 25 42 66 Population that was immigrant, 1980 Population that was immigrant, 2000 10 14 3 3 12 25 25 39 The Northeast’s high-poverty suburbs experienced widespread social change over the two decades.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

(Scotts Valley, Calif.: CreateSpace, 2017), 33, 50, 60; “Winning: No Country For Old Men Or New Mothers,” Strategy Page, November 13, 2018, https://strategypage.com/htmw/htwin/articles/20181113.aspx. 20 Joe Myers, “China’s working-age population will fall 23% by 2050,” World Economic Forum, July 25, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/china-working-ageing-population/. 21 U.S. House of Representatives, “Genocide: China’s Missing Girls,” Hearing Before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 114th Congress, February 3, 2016 (U.S. Government Publishing Office), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-114hhrg99772/html/CHRG-114hhrg99772.htm. 22 John Dale Gover, “Xi’s China Dreams Will Not Age Well,” Real Clear World, November 9, 2017, https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2017/11/09/xis_china_dreams_will_not_age_well_112625.html. 23 Robinson Meyer, “A Terrifying Sea-Level Prediction Now Looks Far Less Likely,” Atlantic, January 4, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/sea-level-rise-may-not-become-catastrophic-until-after-2100/579478/; Roger Pielke, Jr., “Some Good News—About Natural Disasters, of All Things,” Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-good-newsabout-natural-disasters-of-all-things-1533331596; Nicholas Fondacaro, “NYT Reporter Demands You Become ‘Hysterical’ About Climate Change,” NewsBusters, November 25, 2018, https://www.newsbusters. org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2018/11/25/nyt-reporter-demands-you-become-hysterical-about-climate. 24 Steven E.

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In Canada, the number of people in temp jobs has been growing at more than triple the pace of permanent employment, since many workers who lose industrial jobs fail to find another full-time permanent position.12 The same patterns can be seen in traditionally labor-friendly European countries. From 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population in the EU15 and the United States, or up to 162 million individuals, are doing contract work.13 A similar trend shows up in developing countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines.14 Even in Japan, long known as a country of secure long-term employment, the trend is toward part-time, conditional work.

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As the employment base shrinks, some countries have raised taxes on the existing labor force to pay for the swelling ranks of retirees.18 In certain places, the prospect of an inexorable depopulation looms: in Russia between 1991 and 2011, around 13 million more people died than were born.19 China’s working-age population (those between 15 and 64 years old) peaked in 2011 and is projected to drop 23 percent by 2050.20 This decline will be exacerbated by the effects of the now discarded one-child policy, which led to the aborting of an estimated 37 million Chinese girls since it came into force in 1980.21 These grim statistics have created an imbalance between the sexes that could pose an existential threat to President Xi’s “China dream,” and perhaps to the stability of the Communist state.22 Getting Beyond Dogma Given the likely effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the world’s future climate, it will probably be necessary to change how we live, produce energy, and get around—even if such changes have significant economic costs.

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle
by Dinny McMahon
Published 13 Mar 2018

For decades, China seemed to have an endless supply of workers willing to leave the countryside for better-paying jobs in the city. As long as there were more workers on the way, wages remained low. But that endless supply has come to an end. Traveling around the countryside, even the casual observer can see that many villages are filled with no one but children and their elderly guardians, the working-age population having already moved to the cities. All developing economies, if they develop fast enough and for long enough, eventually get to a point where the flood of new workers looking for urban factory jobs slows to a trickle. That’s clearly happening in China. Where China differs is that, at the same time, the overall pool of workers is shrinking.

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Where China differs is that, at the same time, the overall pool of workers is shrinking. Demography As Destiny In 2012, the number of Chinese between the ages of fifteen and fifty-nine started declining, shrinking by more than 3 million people. According to the United Nations Population Division, China’s working-age population (currently about 1 billion people) will fall by 45 million people between 2015 and 2030, and then will lose a further 150 million people by 2050. Usually that kind of reversal is the result of war, disease, or famine. China’s demographic woes, however, are the unintended consequences of government policy.

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That’s what makes Lou Jiwei, who until late 2016 was China’s finance minister, so pessimistic about the country’s growth prospects. “In the next five to ten years, the chance of China sliding into the middle-income trap is extremely high. I put the odds at 50–50,” Lou said in a speech to Tsinghua University students in mid-2015. “Why? . . . Because society is aging and the working-age population is shrinking too fast.” The middle-income trap is an idea first conceived by World Bank economists who found that, of the 101 developing economies that, in 1960, could be classified as having been “middle income” (that is, they weren’t stuck in poverty, but they didn’t qualify as developed nations either), only 13—a group that includes Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, and Ireland—managed to become rich nations by 2008.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends
by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika
Published 12 May 2015

Based on current trends and definitions, the annual growth rate of the global labor force is set to weaken from around 1.4 percent annually between 1990 and 2010 to about 1 percent to 2030.31 In 1964, the working-age group (fifteen to sixty-four) accounted for 58 percent of the total population, reaching a peak of 68 percent in 2012.32 In the next fifty years, however, the working-age population is expected to drop to 61 percent, while the share of elderly (sixty-five and up) in the total population could increase to 23 percent, from 9 percent in 2012.33 In China, some 70 percent of the population works today, one of the highest such shares in the world. But in January 2013, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that the country’s working-age population actually fell in 2012. And as the country’s population ages, the proportion of Chinese who are working should fall to 67 percent by 2030.

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After nearly three decades of declining interest rates, the cost of capital cannot get cheaper, and it could rise over the next twenty years. After a prolonged period of falling and steady prices for natural resources, the cost of everything from grain to steel is becoming more volatile. The demographic surplus the world enjoyed as working-age populations grew and China joined the global trading system is likely to turn into a demographic deficit as population growth grinds to a halt and the world’s labor force ages. Although inequality between countries continues to shrink, in many parts of the world, individuals—particularly those with low job skills—are at risk of growing up poorer than their parents.

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Across the European Union (EU), the population is expected to increase by 5 percent until 2040 and then start to shrink.16 In Germany (2014 fertility rate: 1.4), which has long stood out for its weak population growth, the European Commission believes the population could shrink by 19 percent by 2060.17 The country’s working-age population is expected to fall from fifty-four million in 2010 to thirty-six million in 2060.18 Proportion of elderly in global population is increasing rapidly NOTE: Old age dependency ratio = Population aged 65+ over population 15-64 SOURCE: McKinsey Global Institute analysis, UN population data Germany has been able to mask its decline by attracting immigrants from Russia, Turkey, Africa, and elsewhere.

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us
by John Hills
Published 6 Nov 2014

This means that there was much less variation in disposable incomes than there was in the market incomes shown in Figure 3.4. Figure 3.6 shows ‘disposable’ incomes by age. These are after adding in cash (but not in kind) benefits, and after deducting direct taxes (Income Tax and NICs). As can be seen, disposable incomes were lower than market incomes for the working-age population, but higher for those over 60. The combination of taxes and benefits smoothed out a large part of the variation between age groups. The highest disposable incomes – about £28,000 – were still for those in their late forties, but state pensions and other benefits raised average income for the older age groups to above £17,000, nearly two-thirds of the maximum rather than less than one-third.

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But only 2 per cent of those aged 18–59 had been receiving the main out-of-work benefits (excluding those on long-term disability benefits) of different kinds for more than three years out of the four years up to 2008 (some of whom will have had periods in work, or at least off benefits). This had jumped to 3.3 per cent by 2012, with the onset of the recession, but again does not bear out a picture of most people on benefits being there permanently.23 If those who are receiving long-term disability and incapacity benefits are included, the proportion of the working-age population receiving out-of-work benefits for most of a four-year period rises to 8 per cent, but that is including many who have effectively already retired for health or disability reasons. Again, the picture reflects substantial turnover. Looking at households (of working age), between 16 and 17 per cent were ‘workless’ for any reason (not just unemployment) at any particular moment between the late 1990s and late 2000s.

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The evolution of pensions at the time implied inadequate pensions for many, and an increasingly unequal distribution of pension rights.25 The Commission identified a whole series of problems with the UK system: • The state pension system was – and still is – one of the least generous in the industrialised world,26 and had evolved into one of ‘unique complexity’.27 • While occupational pensions provided more for some workers, only about half of the working-age population were building up an occupational pension, or had a partner who was doing so.28 • The value of the basic state pension, the foundation of the system, had been adjusted only in line with prices, rather than earnings, since the early 1980s, and so had become much less valuable in relation to current incomes.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right
by Philippe Legrain
Published 22 Apr 2014

Everyone who is going to reach the age of fifteen by then has already been born – and they are greatly outnumbered by the baby-boomers who are going to reach sixty-five (or die) over that period.557 That is true even in the UK, which has a better demographic profile than most.558 In the absence of migration, Eurostat projects that the EU’s working-age population will fall by 0.5 per cent a year between 2015 and 2020 and by 0.7 per cent a year between 2020 and 2030. Barring a pandemic or other disaster, the number of Europeans aged sixty-five and over is set to soar as the baby boomers retire and people generally live longer. In the absence of migration, Eurostat projects that their numbers will leap from 87 million in 2010 to 122.7 million in 2030.559 By then, they would account for a quarter of the EU population, up from 17.4 per cent in 2010.560 Since, in the absence of migration, the working-age population is going to shrink while (barring a disaster) the number of over-65s is set to soar, society will change dramatically in all sorts of ways, from attitudes to risk to voting patterns.

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People might choose to work less because taxes on labour income are punitive – or more, in order to achieve their desired income. In any case, the lower taxes on working are, the less distorted people’s decisions will be. A bigger issue is that far fewer people work in some European countries than elsewhere. For now, this divergence is not due to demography.93 The main problem is that a smaller share of the working-age population is employed. Some European countries do much better than America. In Iceland and Switzerland, the employment rate was just shy of 80 per cent in 2012, followed by Norway and the Netherlands, where three in four people of working age work. Then comes a cluster of northern European countries – Sweden, Germany and Denmark – in the low 70s.

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This should start as soon as possible, so that baby boomers also participate. For example, the official retirement age could rise by three months each year until it reaches the age of seventy. So in Britain, where the retirement age is sixty-five in 2014, this would reach seventy by 2029. In the absence of migration, the working-age population is set to shrink. Without reform, ever fewer workers will have to sustain ever more pensioners. Radical reforms to get more people into work could partly offset these demographic trends, especially in southern European countries where employment rates are low. In northern European countries where employment rates are generally higher, the biggest boost would come from raising people’s actual retirement age (see footnotes for detailed calculations).576 Foreign youth While boosting employment and encouraging people to retire later would make a big difference, migration would also help smooth the adjustment in several ways.

Men Without Work
by Nicholas Eberstadt
Published 4 Sep 2016

Further, by the metric of prime-age male unemployment, the pace of recovery from the “Great Reces sion” looks to have been more rapid and dynamic than many recessions in the postwar era. But the unemployment rate was created in an age when mass withdrawal of working-age men from the workforce was inconceivable. Consequently, it takes no account of the very group that has been growing most rapidly within America’s postwar male working-age population: a group that now vastly outnumbers those formally unemployed. Yes, the unemployment rate still has its uses. Administrators, for example, still need to know how many unemployment insurance checks to mail out each month. But it no longer serves as a reliable predictor for the numbers or proportions of persons who are not working—or, for that matter, for those who are working.

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Near Full Employment, Some Slack Remains,” Bloomberg, April 7, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-07/yellen-says-u-s-close-to-full-employment-some-slack-remains. 9.Note that the workforce is officially defined as the sixteen-plus population (more or less is the age you legally can get out of school); historically it was the fourteen-plus population. In this study, I use three measures working age population: twenty-plus, twenty-to-sixty-four, and the “prime working” ages of twenty-five-to-fifty-four. 10.While the U.S. Great Depression is conventionally dated as lasting from 1929 to 1939, in part to concord with the eruption of World War II that ended any peacetime economic slumps besetting European powers, unemployment data suggest that the effects of the Depression continued on into 1940 and 1941—indeed almost to our entry into that same conflict.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

Birth rates are falling below replacement levels in many regions of the world – not only in Europe, where the decline began, but also in most of South America and the Caribbean, much of Asia including China and southern India, and even some countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Lebanon, Morocco and Iran. Ageing is an economic challenge because unless retirement ages are drastically increased so that older members of society can continue to contribute to the workforce (an economic imperative that has many economic benefits), the working-age population falls at the same time as the percentage of dependent elders increases. As the population ages and there are fewer young adults, purchases of big-ticket items such as homes, furniture, cars and appliances decrease. In addition, fewer people are likely to take entrepreneurial risks because ageing workers tend to preserve the assets they need to retire comfortably rather than set up new businesses.

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These habits and patterns may change of course, as ageing societies adapt, but the general trend is that an ageing world is destined to grow more slowly unless the technology revolution triggers major growth in productivity, defined simply as the ability to work smarter rather than harder. The fourth industrial revolution provides us with the ability to live longer, healthier and more active lives. As we live in a society where more than a quarter of the children born today in advanced economies are expected to live to 100, we will have to rethink issues such the working age population, retirement and individual life-planning.16 The difficulty that many countries are showing in attempting to discuss these issues is just a further sign of how we are not prepared to adequately and proactively recognize the forces of change. Productivity Over the past decade, productivity around the world (whether measured as labour productivity or total-factor productivity (TFP)) has remained sluggish, despite the exponential growth in technological progress and investments in innovation.17 This most recent incarnation of the productivity paradox – the perceived failure of technological innovation to result in higher levels of productivity – is one of today’s great economic enigmas that predates the onset of the Great Recession, and for which there is no satisfactory explanation.

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity
by Stephen D. King
Published 14 Jun 2010

These increases present major challenges – China, famously, will be the first country to grow old before it grows rich – but they do not alter the underlying fact that the ageing process in the developed world is much more advanced – in fact, thirty years earlier – than in most other countries.5 An alternative approach is to consider the changing supply of workers (aged fifteen to sixty-five) by region over time. In 1950, the population of working age in the developed nations stood at 494 million out of a global total of 1.4 billion, a share of 33.8 per cent. In 2000, the working-age population in the developed nations had increased to 743 million but the global total had increased much more, reaching 3.7 billion, leaving the developed nation share down at 20.3 per cent. By 2050, the UN estimates the working-age population in the developed world will have declined to just 662 million, a share of only 12.4 per cent in a global total which, by then, may be as high as 5.3 billion, a reflection of continued population increases in the emerging world and a rapid population acceleration in the world’s most impoverished nations.

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(i) Wills Moody, Helen (i) Wimbledon (i), (ii), (iii) Winder, Robert (i) wine (i), (ii), (iii) WIR see World Investment Report Wolf, Martin (i) women’s vote (i) wool industry (i), (ii) workers see also labour nationalism (i) running out of workers (i) command over limited resources (i) demographic dividends and deficits (i) demographic dynamics (i) infant mortality (i) Japan: an early lesson in ageing (i) not the time to close the borders (i) pensions and healthcare (i) a renewed look at migration (i) scarcity (i) working-age population (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) World Bank (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) WorldCom (i) World Development Indicators (i) World Economic Forum (i), (ii) World Economic Outlook (i) World Financial Center, Shanghai (i) World Investment Report (WIR) (i) World Trade Organization (WTO) (i), (ii), (iii) Wright Brothers (i) The Writing on the Wall (Hutton) (i), (ii) WTO see World Trade Organization Wu, Ximing (i), (ii) xenophobia (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Y2K threat (i) yen (i), (ii), (iii) Yom Kippur War (i) Yugoslavia (i) Yu Zhu (i) Zaidi, S.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 15 Mar 2015

In the first decade of this century, Japan’s economy grew at a measly average annual rate of 0.78 percent from 2000 to 2011, compared with 1.8 percent for the United States. BUT JAPAN’S SLOW growth does not look so bad under close examination. Any serious student of economic performance needs to look not at overall growth, but at growth related to the size of the working-age population. Japan’s working-age population (ages 15 to 64) shrank 5.5 percent from 2001 to 2010, while the number of Americans of that age increased by 9.2 percent—so we should expect to see slower GDP growth. But even before Abenomics, Japan’s real economic output, per member of the labor force, grew at a faster rate over the first decade of the century than that of the United States, Germany, Britain, or Australia.

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Meanwhile, its failure to do what it could and should have done to make the financial market work better for ordinary Americans—to ensure competition, to restrict the excessive fees that credit and debit cards charge to merchants that ultimately get paid by consumers, to restore lending to small and medium-size enterprises, to create a mortgage market that serves Americans rather than the interests of the banks—has hurt those in the middle and bottom at the same time that it has enriched the coffers of the banks. Yellen is right, too, to point out (as I have done in this book) the limits to monetary policy. It is hard-pressed to restore the economy to full employment on its own. Indeed, it may be contributing to the jobless recovery that we are experiencing (the percentage of the working-age population that is employed, though it has rebounded slightly since the crisis, is still lower than at any time since 1984). Low interest rates encourage firms, when they invest, to invest in very capital intensive technologies—replacing unskilled workers with machines makes no sense in an era in which so many unskilled workers are striving to find jobs.

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Still, “Japan Should Be Alert” points to the dangers of increasing inequality.3 Large changes in Japan’s economy have occurred over the past quarter-century, and Japan has been under pressure to make some of the “market reforms” that contributed to the growth of inequality elsewhere. There are signs of a troubling increase in inequality—and matters could get worse. Nonetheless, on balance, I believe “Japan is a model—not a cautionary tale.” The image of Japan’s lackluster growth is distorted by the decline of its labor force (working-age population). If one takes that into account, in the past decade or so Japan has been toward the top of the league tables—hard as that is for many to believe, given the criticisms that have been leveled at Japan. Even more, as I mentioned earlier, it has so far been able to manage more inclusive growth than America has.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards
Published 7 Apr 2014

That drop in population growth beginning thirty-five years ago is affecting the adult workforce composition today. The results are summarized in a recent report produced by the IMF: China is on the eve of a demographic shift that will have profound consequences on its economic and social landscape. Within a few years the working age population will reach a historical peak, and will then begin a precipitous decline. The core of this working age population, those aged 20–39 years, has already begun to shrink. With this, the vast supply of low-cost workers—a core engine of China’s growth model—will dissipate, with potentially far-reaching implications domestically and externally. Importantly, when labor force participation levels off, technology is the only driver of growth.

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The Economist, along with many others, has cited adverse demographics as a major hurdle in the way of more robust European growth. Europe does have a rapidly aging society (as do Russia, Japan, China, and other major economies). Over a twenty-year horizon, the demographics of working-age populations are rigid in a closed society, which can be a large determinant of economic outcomes, but this view ignores forms of flexibility even in a closed society. A working-age population is not the same as a workforce. When unemployment is high, as it is in much of Europe, new entrants can come into the workforce at a much higher rate than population growth, assuming jobs are available.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Eichengreen, Global Imbalances and the Lessons of Bretton Woods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 44.Geoffrey Barlow, The Labour Movement in Britain from Thatcher to Blair (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). 45.As an indication of the success of the neoliberal project to crush union power definitively, the proportion of the total working-age population belonging to unions fell in seventeen out of twenty-one OECD nations in the period 1980–2000, and fell again in nineteen out of twenty-one in the period 2000–07. OECD, ‘Trade Union Density’, OECD Stat Extracts, at stats.oecd.org. 46.David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 11–14. 47.Ibid., p. 13. 48.Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), Chapter 1. 49.Tim Jordan, Activism!

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In other words, part-time workers, informal workers and underemployed workers all count as employed. The ILO definition of unemployment also improves when people drop out of the labour force: a smaller workforce means lower unemployment. A more meaningful measure is therefore the level of employment among the working-age population, according to which the ILO estimates that over 40 per cent of the world’s population is not employed. ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, p. 18. In a similar measure, they estimate that only half the global labour force is in waged or salaried work. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), p. 28.

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State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide, Gallup, 2013, pdf available at ihrim.org, p. 27. Another study, based on ILO data on the unemployed, vulnerably employed and economically inactive, estimates the surplus population at 61 per cent of the total working-age population (calculated from data by Neilson and Stubbs, ‘Relative Surplus Population, p. 444). The conclusion to draw from these alternative measures is simple: the global surplus population is massive, and in fact outnumbers the formal working class. 45.Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, transl.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 1 Jan 2008

Surprisingly, many Asian countries—with the exception of India—are in demographic situations similar to or even worse than Europe’s. The fertility rates in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, and China* are well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per female, and estimates indicate that major East Asian nations will face a sizable reduction in their working-age population over the next half century. The working-age population in Japan has already peaked; in 2010, Japan had three million fewer workers than in 2005. Worker populations in China and Korea are also likely to peak within the next decade. Goldman Sachs predicts that China’s median age will rise from thirty-three in 2005 to forty-five in 2050, a remarkable graying of the population.

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First, there is the pension burden—fewer workers supporting more gray-haired elders. Second, as the economist Benjamin Jones has shown, most innovative inventors—and the overwhelming majority of Nobel laureates—do their most important work between the ages of thirty and forty-four. A smaller working-age population, in other words, means fewer technological, scientific, and managerial advances. Third, as workers age, they go from being net savers to being net spenders, with dire ramifications for national saving and investment rates. For advanced industrial countries—which are already comfortable, satisfied, and less prone to work hard—bad demographics are a killer disease.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Jan 2017

, Harvard University and Centre for Economics Policy Research discussion paper, http://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/who-needs-the-nation-state.pdf 15.Ibid. 16.Barry Eichengreen, ‘Spinning Beyond Brexit’, Prospect, November 2016. 17.Lawrence Summers, ‘Voters deserve responsible nationalism not reflex globalism’, Financial Times, 10 July 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/15598db8–4456–11e6–9b66–0712b3873ae1 18.Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair, London: Macmillan, 1998. 19.Brendan Simms, Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation, London: Allen Lane, 2016. 20.David Owen, Europe Restructured: The Eurozone Crisis and the UK Referendum, London: Methuen, 2012. David Goodhart, ‘The Path Not Taken’, Demos Quarterly, Issue Two April 2014 http://quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-2/the-path-not-taken/ 21.Multiple sources: a.[EU working age population] b.[UK working-age population born in another EU country] Table 1.2, 2015 data, ‘Dataset: Population of the United Kingdom by Country of Birth and Nationality’, Office for National Statistics, 25 August 2016, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/datasets/populationoftheunitedkingdombycountryofbirthandnationality c.

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Having absorbed, not without friction, the post-colonial wave in the decades after the 1950s, Britain in the mid-1990s had become a multiracial society with an immigrant and settled minority population of around 4 million, or about 7 per cent. Britain was not at that stage a mass immigration society with persistently large inflows. Today it is. About 18 per cent of today’s working age population was born abroad and in the past generation Britain’s immigrant and minority population (including the white non-British) has trebled to about 12 million, or over 20 per cent (25 per cent in England).15 Some of this is an open society success story—consider the increasingly successful minority middle class.16 But to many people the change is simply too rapid, symbolised by the fact that many of our largest towns, including London, Birmingham and Manchester—where more than half the minority population live—are now at or close to majority–minority status.

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn
by Chris Hughes
Published 20 Feb 2018

In some cases, these contract jobs are a godsend because they help workers who only get part-time hours elsewhere to supplement their income, as laborers have done since the beginning of time. We often think of millennials in these jobs, the masters of the art of the “side hustle,” but the numbers show it isn’t just millennials doing contingent work. A quarter of the working-age population in the United States and Europe engage in some type of independently paid gig, some by choice, but many out of necessity. People who find work through apps like Lyft and TaskRabbit get a lot of attention, but they are the tip of the iceberg. The instability that characterizes their work has spread throughout the economy as the class of low-quality jobs has grown.

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See Wartzman, “Populists Want to Bring Back the Blue-Collar Golden Age”; and Oxfam America and Economic Policy Institute, “Few Rewards.” 45 “For workers, the American corporation used to act as a shock absorber”: Wartzman, End of Loyalty, 5. 46 the numbers show it isn’t just millennials doing contingent work: Baab-Muguira, “Millennials Are Obsessed with Side Hustles.” 46 A quarter of the working-age population in the United States and Europe engage in some type of independently paid gig: Manyika et al., “Independent Work.” 46 the number of people working in contingent jobs balloons to over 40 percent of all American workers: Pofeldt, “Shocker: 40% of Workers Now Have ‘Contingent’ Jobs.” 46 of all the jobs created between 2005 and 2015, 94 percent of them were contract or temporary: Katz and Krueger, “Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements.” 46 Many of these jobs of the new economy pay poorly: Dews, “Charts of the Week”; Vo and Zumbrun, “Just How Good (or Bad) Are All the Jobs Added?”

How Asia Works
by Joe Studwell
Published 1 Jul 2013

The size and age profile of a country’s population has a huge impact on its developmental potential. Labour is an input into an economy – a form of ‘capital’ – just like money, and a large working-age population relative to the cohorts of children and retired people increases the possibilities for fast growth. Rapidly declining death rates – particularly for children – and rapidly rising working-age populations have been a big part of the east Asian developmental story since the Second World War. These demographic trends, largely the result of advances in medicine and sanitation, have facilitated unprecedented growth.

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After a tipping point, workforces start to shrink quickly, and older people consume their savings, devouring what were previously funds for investment. Japan’s problems since the 1980s have been bound up with acute demographic challenges in an only recently matured industrial economy. In China, the very fast growth of the working-age population that accompanied economic take-off is peaking already, and the country’s demographic headwinds will slowly increase this decade. Demographics are important. However, a certain demographic profile has been part and parcel of the developmental experience of all east Asian states. In this sense the demographic story is a given.

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Then Deng Xiaoping and his successors put the brakes on the birth rate, which was already slowing, with an often brutally enforced policy to limit child-bearing. Yet despite the misery induced by these Brave New World-style interventions, China’s developmental performance has been shaped by the same policy choices in agriculture, manufacturing and finance that have made the difference elsewhere. In the end the size of your working-age population is still less important to your developmental progress than what you do with that population. The other influence on development that is given only a background role in this book is education. Here, the reason is that the evidence of a positive correlation between total years of education and GDP growth is much weaker than most people imagine.11 The strongest evidence globally concerns primary schooling, but even with respect to that formative period of education when people learn basic literacy and numeracy skills there are states like South Korea and Taiwan that took off economically with educational capital that was well below average.

Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage
by Ruth Fincher and Peter Saunders
Published 1 Jul 2001

(Botwinik 1993, pp. 111 and 113) 204 PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\MAIN p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 4995 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 204 BEYOND IMPOVERISHED VISIONS OF THE LABOUR MARKET Table 7.1 Comparison between static and dynamic accounts of the labour market, Australia, mid-1990s Static account Category Dynamic account % Unemployment rate (per cent of labour force) Incidence of long-term unemployment (per cent of unemployed) Marginally attached to the labour force (per cent of labour force) 9 33 8 Casualisation rate 25 (per cent of employees) Source: Category % Looking for work during the year (per cent of those in working age population) Job search periods lasting more than a year (per cent of all jobseekers) Period of absence from the labour market (per cent of those in working age population) Working in jobs that were not permanent (per cent of all wage & salary paying jobs) 23 46 27 39 Static from ABS Labour Force Surveys (except for marginally attached which comes from unpublished ABS Survey of Training and Education 1993).

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Unlikely to obtain employment anywhere, the migrants in Fitchen’s study were attracted to their rural destinations by cheap rental housing there, left behind by those seeking employment elsewhere. In Australia, Wulff and Bell (1997) have described the migration patterns of low-income groups, especially social security recipients, using unpublished census data, finding these groups contributing greatly to the redistribution of the working-age population around the country. For example, between one-third and a half of the net outflow of population from Sydney and Melbourne between 1986 and 1991 was of households with annual incomes of less than $16 000, and about one-quarter of those 162 PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\MAIN p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 4995 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 162 MOVING IN AND OUT OF DISADVANTAGE leaving were unemployed (Wulff and Bell 1997, p. 33).

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

In the north of India, the population is booming due to high fertility rates, but in the south, where most economic development is taking place, fertility is falling rapidly. In a further twist, fertility is highest in poorly educated rural areas and lowest in highly educated urban areas. In total, 25 percent of India’s working-age population has no education whatsoever. In 2030, a sixth of the country’s potential workforce could be totally uneducated. As for Japan, the fertility rate is approximately 35 percent below the necessary replacement level and this has huge implications for productivity and public debt. Western Europe is not quite in this position, but the region is expected to experience population stagnation, with Germany—the region’s economic powerhouse—experiencing population decline.

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As for the USA, it is almost unique among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations in having a population that is expected to grow by 20 percent from 2010–2030. Moreover, the USA has a track record of successfully assimilating immigrants. As a result it’s likely to see a rise in the size of its working-age population and to witness strong economic growth over the longer term. Of course, all these estimates could be wildly off the mark. Perhaps another great famine, global pandemic or a world war could kill off billions of people, or maybe people will suddenly start having much larger families for reasons of economic survival or for status.

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa
by Irene Yuan Sun
Published 16 Oct 2017

Wang, Ahmed had trouble finding a steady job. Sadly, his experience is common in Africa today. African nations already have some of the highest unemployment rates in the world.14 In Nigeria, the official rate is 12.1 percent, but the government recognizes an additional 19.1 percent of the working-age population as underemployed.15 For young people, the situation is much worse: a distressingly high 42.2 percent.16 In addition, continent-wide, 77.4 percent of those lucky enough to be employed have what the International Labour Organization calls “vulnerable jobs”—those without formal working arrangements and likely to lack decent working conditions and job security.17 According to the World Bank, 90 percent of the jobs created in Africa today are in the informal sector—the very ones that lead to vulnerability rather than a stable path to the middle class.18 Add in the demographic bulge that will double Africa’s working-age population, and it’s easy to see that the continent is facing an acute need for formal job creation of the sort that factories bring.

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African nations already have some of the highest unemployment rates in the world.14 In Nigeria, the official rate is 12.1 percent, but the government recognizes an additional 19.1 percent of the working-age population as underemployed.15 For young people, the situation is much worse: a distressingly high 42.2 percent.16 In addition, continent-wide, 77.4 percent of those lucky enough to be employed have what the International Labour Organization calls “vulnerable jobs”—those without formal working arrangements and likely to lack decent working conditions and job security.17 According to the World Bank, 90 percent of the jobs created in Africa today are in the informal sector—the very ones that lead to vulnerability rather than a stable path to the middle class.18 Add in the demographic bulge that will double Africa’s working-age population, and it’s easy to see that the continent is facing an acute need for formal job creation of the sort that factories bring. Why specifically those jobs? Because manufacturing jobs are unlike other jobs, and they’re more important for Africa than other types of jobs are. Manufacturing forms a significant proportion of what’s called the traded sector (as opposed to the non-traded sector, which includes most local services, such as restaurants, shops, construction, and even highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers).

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

Wealthy populations are, therefore, aging. As the population ages, the labor force shrinks, and fewer and fewer workers support more and more retirees. Forty countries now have shrinking working-age populations, including China, Japan, and Russia.2 Fear naturally sets in as middle-aged citizens wonder who will pay for their retirement. Japan is in the forefront of population aging, with its working-age population falling at 1 percent per year, and nearly four hundred schools shutting every year.3 Thus far, it has adapted in two ways. Its workers are staying in the workforce longer, beyond the normal retirement age, and women are working outside the home at a greater rate.

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George Megalogenis, “Powering Australia’s Economic Surge,” The New York Times, November 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/opinion/powering-australias-economic-surge.html. 2. “Gone in Their Prime: Many Countries Suffer from Shrinking Working-age Populations,” The Economist, May 5, 2018, https://www.economist.com/international/2018/05/05/many-countries-suffer-from-shrinking-working-age-populations?frsc=dg%7Ce. 3. “Concentrate!: A Small Japanese City Shrinks with Dignity,” The Economist, January 11, 2018, https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21734405-authorities-are-focusing-keeping-centre-alive-small-japanese-city-shrinks-dignity?

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
by William Julius Wilson
Published 1 Jan 1996

Today, most of the new jobs for workers with limited education and experience are in the service sector, which hires relatively more women. One study found that the U.S. created 27 clerical, sales, and service jobs per thousand of working-age population in the 1980s. During the same period, the country lost 16 production, transportation, and laborer jobs per thousand of working-age population. In another study the social scientists Robert Lerman and Martin Rein revealed that from 1989 to 1993, the period covering the economic downturn, social service industries (health, education, and welfare) added almost 3 million jobs, while 1.4 million jobs were lost in all other industries.

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The proportion of male workers in the prime of their life (between the ages of 22 and 58) who worked in a given decade full-time, year-round, in at least eight out of ten years declined from 79 percent during the 1970s to 71 percent in the 1980s. While the American economy saw a rapid expansion in high technology and services, especially advanced services, growth in blue-collar factory, transportation, and construction jobs, traditionally held by men, has not kept pace with the rise in the working-age population. These men are working less as a result. The growth of a nonworking class of prime-age males along with a larger number of those who are often unemployed, who work part-time, or who work in temporary jobs is concentrated among the poorly educated, the school dropouts, and minorities. In the 1970s, two-thirds of prime-age male workers with less than a high school education worked full-time, year-round, in eight out of ten years.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 8 Apr 2012

The way the Kremlin is dealing with perhaps the worst aging problem in the emerging world offers another example of how even good news has a way of disappointing in the end. Russia’s working-age population will fall by about 870,000 people per year between 2010 and 2015. That’s a loss of close to 1 percent of the working population each year, double the European average, and the only example of demographic decay among the largest emerging markets. In the same 2010–2015 period the working-age population in India will rise nearly 2 percent per year, and in China 0.5 percent (after which China’s labor force, too, will begin to decline). The one clear solution to the graying-population problem is immigration—letting in more young families from abroad—but it’s a solution Russia resisted for nearly two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.

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They both have rapidly aging populations, which threaten to undermine the prospects for an Asian century. The fertility rates of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan rank 218th, 219th, and 220th in the world, respectively, all clustered around 1.2 children per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. With working-age populations on the verge of rapidly shrinking, tensions between workers and retirees are bound to increase. South Korea and Taiwan also share an unusual status as the richer part of divided nations, a factor that played no small role in their relentless focus on economic growth. At the end of World War II, South Korea was divided from North Korea, and Taiwan separated from mainland China.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

In Japan, the population share of those at least sixty-five years of age climbed from 13 to 21 percent in the past decade, and United Nations demographers expect it to reach 31 percent by 2030. The Japanese working-age population is already declining and is projected to fall from eighty-four million in 2007 to sixty-nine million by 2030. Europe's working-age population is also anticipated to recede, though less than Japan's. The changes projected for the United States are not as severe, but nonetheless present daunting challenges. Over the next quarter century, the annual growth rate of the working-age population in the United States is anticipated to slow, from 1 percent today to about 0.3 percent by 2030.

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This tectonic shift is truly a twenty-first-century problem. Retirement is a relatively new phenomenon in human history; average life expectancy a century ago for much of the developed world was only forty-six years. Relatively few people survived long enough to experience retirement. The ratio of the dependent elderly to the working-age population has been rising in the industrialized world for at least 150 years. The pace of increase slowed markedly with the birth of the baby-boom generation after More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright. 

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But who assures that the hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, physicians, nurses, and medical infrastructure generally will be in place to convert a paper promise into valuable future medical services? A simple test for any retirement system is whether it can assure the availability of promised real resources to retirees without overly burdening the working-age population. By that measure, America may be on a collision course with reality. The oldest baby boomers become eligible for Social Security in 2008. By 2030, according to UN projections, people sixty-five years of age and older will account for more than 23 percent of the adult population, compared with 16 percent today.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019

The public purse: • Migrants contribute more in taxes and social contributions than they receive in benefits. • Labour migrants have the most positive impact on the public purse. • Employment is the single biggest determinant of migrants’ net fiscal contribution. Economic growth: • Migration boosts the working-age population. • Migrants arrive with skills and contribute to human capital development of receiving countries. • Migrants also contribute to technological progress. These points are true but, as a summary of the impact of migration, they are incomplete to the point of being misleading. In December 2015, Stephen Nickell and Jumana Saleheen of the Bank of England published a working paper that concluded: We find that the immigrant-to-native ratio has a small negative impact on average British wages.

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For both of these, there are grounds for optimism. ENSURING THAT SUFFICIENT VALUABLE GOODS AND SERVICES ARE PRODUCED Sufficient valuable goods and services will be produced if there is capacity to produce them (supply) and enough demand for them – and if supply and demand are able to find each other. The world’s working-age population continues to grow, so the supply of labour should not on its own be an obstacle. In any case, new technology, as we saw in Chapter 5, will enable the world to produce everything it produces today with half the workforce so that even in societies with ageing populations, shortage of workers is unlikely to produce supply constraints.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

(In September 2018, only 3.7 percent of the labor force was without jobs.) These statistics, though, give too rosy a picture: only 70 percent of the working-age population has jobs, far lower than in other countries, such as Switzerland and Iceland, where it is 80 and 86 percent, respectively.23 And many in the United States—some 3 percent—are working part-time involuntarily because they can’t get a full-time job. America’s unemployment rate might be still higher if it were not that so many people were in jail—almost 1 percent of the working-age population, far larger than in any other country.24 A reflection of the weakness in the labor market is that real wages have been increasing slowly—even after years of stagnation during the Great Recession, in 2017 they increased only 1.2 percent for full-time workers over sixteen, and even then, they were still below their 2006 level.25 Fiscal policy Even when monetary policy fails, fiscal policy can stimulate the economy.

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Given the stagnation of incomes in the middle and bottom that I have described—compounded by the enormous losses of jobs and homes that marked the Great Recession—none of this should be a surprise.35 A decline in life expectancy of this magnitude unrelated to war or a pandemic (like HIV) had happened only once before in recent memory: among citizens of the former Soviet Union after it broke up, where there was a collapse of the economy and society itself, with GDP falling by almost a third. Obviously, a country where there is such despair, where so many are on drugs or drinking too much alcohol, won’t have a healthy labor force. A good measure of how well society does in creating good jobs and healthy workers is the fraction of working-age population that is participating in the labor force and working. Here, the US does far worse than many other countries. At least some of our poor labor force participation can be directly linked to our poor health statistics. A recent study by Alan Krueger, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, found that nearly half of “prime-age men” not in the labor force suffer from a serious health condition, and two-thirds of those are also taking some prescription pain medication.36 But America’s poor health is not the result of an unhealthy climate, nor is it because sickly people have migrated to these shores.

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts
by Ashoka Mody
Published 7 May 2018

Japanese authorities made matters worse during much of the 1990s by allowing their banks to continue to operate without adequate capital, which further held back resumption of sustained, healthy growth. In addition to these policy errors, Japan’s aging population reinforced the growth slowdown and deflation. The number of people older than sixty-​five increased, while the working-​age population—​those between twenty and sixty-​five—​stagnated and then slowly declined. The steady shift to an older population reduced consumption and investment demand, which pushed growth and inflation rates further down. Seen from an Italian perspective, Japan’s lost decade was actually an outcome to be envied (figure 8.2).

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By using machines and workers more efficiently, Japanese firms partly overcame their demographic and policy impediments. Italy’s crisis ran much deeper than Japan’s. Italy had all the disadvantages that Japan had and more. Although not as rapidly as Japan’s, Italy’s population was also aging; the country’s working-​age population had flattened out. As in Japan, ECB monetary policy had provided little support, causing a 344   e u r o t r a g e d y 120 115 Japan 110 105 100 95 Italy 90 85 1991 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 2008 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Japan (years on top x-axis) 2000 01 02 Italy (years on bottom x-axis) Figure 8.2.

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Investment spending had fallen sharply in 2012 and 2013 at the onset of the draconian fiscal austerity drive and since then it had either fallen further or stayed stable . The IMF estimated that Italy’s potential growth had declined to about 0.5 percent a year.197 On top of Italy’s long-​term problems, including a working-​age population that had stopped increasing and near-​zero productivity growth, the intense austerity had further damaged long-​term growth prospects. And if Italian GDP growth remained at around the IMF’s potential growth rate estimate, Italy’s financial vulnerabilities would remain worrisome. The recent descent into low inflation made growth harder to revive and added to the risk that debt burdens would remain elevated.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

One of the important consequences of these wider labour market trends—the rise of unemployment, the vanishing middle, the earnings squeeze, the spread of low pay and the weakness of the labour market in many parts of Britain—has been a rise in downward occupational and social mobility. The post-war era was a period of improving pay and opportunity for most of the working-age population. As income growth and job opportunities for middle and lower income groups has slowed, that upward mobility has been petering out, a trend that has been fuelled during each of the three recessions of the last thirty years. Britain is riddled with examples of downward job mobility—of former skilled factory workers cleaning cars, joiners working as airport baggage handlers, trained draughtsmen and IT specialists forced into temporary work in retail and customer services or taxi-driving, often with long gaps of unemployment in between.121 Those most vulnerable to such downward mobility are those over 50 and include professionals as well as the skilled working class.

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It has also fuelled the geographical concentration of work and unemployment. In some towns such as Hartlepool, Knowsley, Blaenau Gwent and Glasgow, the real level of unemployment stood at more than twice the national average even before the onset of the recession. In May 2008, nine towns, headed by Liverpool and Nottingham, had more than a fifth of the working age population in receipt of benefits.130 Sinking pay has also meant a weakening skill base, a process that risks becoming re-inforcing. A low wage economy dictates the type of jobs that are created. As skills disappear, so do the jobs. One of the consequences has been that while some skilled workers can’t find work, in other areas, Britain now has real skill shortages, often the sort of skills that would once have been held by those in the middle.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 12 Nov 2019

Then if they failed to find a job they could go home, and they would be no worse off than if they had not saved and not tried, which is what most of them seem to do. Moreover, the evidence suggests they do save for other things, and $11.50 is very much within their range. So why don’t they? One possible reason is they overestimate the risks. A study from Nepal highlights this. Today, more than a fifth of Nepal’s male working-age population has been abroad at least once, mostly for work. Most of them work in Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates. They typically go for a couple of years, with an employment contract tied to a specific employer. This is a setting where one might imagine the migrants would be very well informed about the potential costs and benefits of migrating, since one needs a job offer to get a visa.

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Wages also declined in these areas compared to the rest of the country (and this was a period of stagnant wage growth overall), especially for low-wage workers. Despite the fact that there were neighboring commuting zones essentially unaffected by the shock (and zones that actually benefitted, say, by importing certain components from China), workers did not move. The working-age population did not decline in the adversely affected commuting zones. They had no work. This experience is not unique to the United States. Spain, Norway, and Germany all suffered similarly from the impact of the China shock.48 In each case the sticky economy became a sticky trap. CLUSTERF**K!

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What happened instead is enough to make one superstitious. The growth rate crashed in 1980, the year after Vogel’s book came out. And it never really recovered. The Solow model suggests a simple reason. Due to a low fertility rate and the near complete absence of immigration, Japan was (and still is) aging rapidly. The working-age population peaked in the late 1990s and has been declining. This means TFP must grow all the more rapidly to keep fast growth going. Another way to say this is that Japan would have to find some miracle for its existing labor force to become more productive, since we still have no reliable way to boost TFP.

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City
by Jack Brown
Published 14 Jul 2021

Smith, ‘Mapping Patient Data to Consider the Role of Geography in Public Health’, Imperial College London, 2012. 60.S. Clarke, ‘London Stalling’, op. cit. 61.Ibid. 62.‘State of the Nation 2017: Social Mobility in Great Britain’, Social Mobility Commission, 11/17. 63.‘Qualifications of working age population’, London Datastore, 12/19. 64.K. Hecht, D. McArthur, M. Savage & S. Friedman, ‘Elites in the UK: Pulling Away? Social mobility, geographic mobility and elite occupations’, The Sutton Trust, 1/20. 65.Ibid. 66.A repeated theme in Jerry White’s excellent histories of the capital, but particularly in J.

A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic
by Nicholas Eberstadt and Nick Eberstadt
Published 18 Oct 2012

According to Census Bureau estimates, 93 percent of West Virginia’s population was “non-Hispanic white” in 2011.43 In New England, by the same token, all-but-lily-white Maine (where ethnic minorities accounted for less than 6 percent of the population44 in 2011) records a 7.4 percent ratio of working-age disability payees to resident working-age population: more than one out of fourteen. On the other hand, in the District of Columbia, where so-called Anglos or non-Hispanic whites composed just 35 percent of the population in 2011,45 the ratio of working-age disability recipients to working-age resident population was 3.3 percent—less than half of Maine’s, and bit more than a third of West Virginia’s.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

That is only a fraction of Western governments’ true liabilities, once you factor in pensions and health care. The numbers for many cities are even worse: San Bernardino in California and Detroit in Michigan both filed for bankruptcy because of these off-balance sheet obligations. And who will pay for all this? In “old Europe,” for instance, the working-age population peaked in 2012 at 308 million—and is set to decline to 265 million by 2060. These will have to support ever more old people: The old-age dependency ratio (the number of over-sixty-fives as a proportion of the number of twenty-to-sixty-four-year-olds) will rise from 28 percent to 58 percent—and that is assuming that the EU lets in more than a million young immigrants a year.9 Across the Atlantic, America continues to tax itself like a small-government country and spend like a big-government one while hiding its true liabilities by using tactics that would have made Bernie Madoff blush.

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Latin American countries tie people’s benefits to adopting good habits, such as sending their ­children to school or having checkups at health clinics. More rich countries could copy that, tying payouts to people’s willingness to invest in skills and education. The second is the reform of disability. In America enrollment in Social Security’s disability-insurance program has ­increased from 1.7 percent of the working-age population in 1970 to 5.4 percent. Americans have taken to enrolling in disability systems when their unemployment pay runs out, spurred on by doctors who have been broadening the definition of disability. But disability is a terrible trap. America’s disability systems do not devote any effort whatsoever to getting people back to work: They were designed in an era when ill people did not get better.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

The authors estimate that the employment penalty is around a 1-percentage-point reduction in the overall employment rate, equivalent to a loss of around 1.8 million workers. Black men suffered a 4.7- to 5.4-percentage-point reduction in their employment rate, while the equivalent for Latino men was 1.4–1.6 percentage points, and for white men it was 1.1–1.3 percentage points. They found that 6–6.7 percent of the male working-age population were former prisoners, while 13.6–15.3 percent were people with felony convictions, which seems incredibly high. Other advanced countries don’t use mass incarceration and don’t prevent ex-prisoners from working after their sentences are completed; they have figured out that rehabilitation works.

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They find that for the 117 million U.S. adults in the bottom half of the income distribution, growth was essentially nonexistent for a generation while at the top of the ladder it has been remarkably strong. They also show that this stagnation of national income accruing at the bottom is not due to population aging. Quite the contrary. For the bottom half of the working-age population (adults under 65), income has in fact fallen. In the bottom half of the distribution, only the income of the elderly is rising. From 1980 to 2014, they show, none of the growth in per-adult national income went to the bottom 50 percent, while 32 percent went to the middle class (defined as adults between the median and the 90th percentile), 68 percent to the top 10 percent, and 36 percent to the top 1 percent.

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While the average rate of drug-overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids increased by 8 percent per year from 1999 to 2013, the average rate increased by 71 percent per year from 2013 to 2017. West Virginia (57.8 deaths per 100,000 people), Ohio (46.3), and Pennsylvania (44.3) had the highest age-adjusted drug-overdose rates. The suicide rate among the U.S. working-age population increased 34 percent during 2000–2016 (Hedegaard, Curtin, and Warner 2018). In 2012 and 2015, suicide rates were highest among males in the “construction and extraction” occupational group (43.6 and 53.2 per 100,000 civilian noninstitutionalized working persons, respectively), who were especially hard hit by the housing crash in the Great Recession.53 The age-adjusted suicide rate for urban counties in 2017 was 16 percent higher than the rate in 1999, whereas in rural counties in 2017 it was 53 percent higher.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 6 Oct 2011

Manufacturing amounted to 20 per cent of the economy in 1997 but 12 per cent in 2007, its decline fostered by sterling appreciation during Labour’s first term. Fittingly in Labour’s economy, construction, estate agency and property rose from 12.6 to 16.2 per cent. By 2010 only one in eight of Coventry’s working-age population of 194,000 was in manufacturing, compared with over one in two in the 1970s. Growth was to be the antidote to debt and deficit, Mandelson said at Labour’s spring conference in February 2010, and the future was bioscience, medicine, advanced manufacturing, precision engineering, creative industries and – a new undertaking – ‘this is not going to happen without active government working hand in hand with enterprise’.

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‘They saved our maternity unit,’ observed Richard Austin, the Boston council leader. Councils complained that the extra numbers failed to bring extra government grants to cover those services. Some areas were unaffected by migration – Merseyside and the North East, for example. Other areas were transformed – 60 per cent of the working-age population of the London Borough of Brent had been born abroad. The 2001 Census was a distant memory and its estimate that 4.9 million or 8.3 per cent of the total population of the UK were born overseas may never have been accurate anyway. When Boston protested at underestimates, the ONS said it recognized a total population for the area of 62,000, but the council put it nearer 75,000, taking its evidence from increased registration of migrants at GPs’ surgeries and schools.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Published 17 Mar 2020

In 2018, the Census Bureau estimated that there were 171 million Americans between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four. Of those, 62 percent were white non-Hispanics, and 62 percent of those did not have a four-year college degree; the less educated white Americans who are the group at risk are 38 percent of the working-age population. The economic forces that are harming labor are common to all working-class Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, but the stories of blacks and whites are markedly different. In the 1970s and 1980s, African Americans working in inner cities experienced events that, in retrospect, share some features with what happened to working-class whites thirty years later.

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Black rates, which were more than twice those of whites as late as the early 1990s, fell as white rates rose, closing the distance between them to 20 percent. Since 2013 the opioid epidemic has spread to black communities, but until then, the epidemic of deaths of despair was white. In the chapters that follow, we document the decline of white working-class lives over the last half century. White non-Hispanics are 62 percent of the working-age population, so understanding their mortality is important in and of itself. The story of what happened to African Americans in the seventies and eighties has been extensively researched and debated,10 and we have nothing to add to that literature except to note that there are some parallels with whites today.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

Installing new machines that saved on labor and used readily available cheap fuel thus made economic sense in Britain, whereas it did not in other countries.86 More important, relative costs can also explain why new technologies will be adopted unevenly around the world in the future. Take Japan, for example: it is no coincidence that progress in nursing robotics has been particularly swift there. They have one of the largest elderly populations in the world—more than 25 percent are over sixty-five, with the working-age population shriveling at 1 percent a year—and a well-known antipathy toward foreign migrants working in their public services. The result is a shortage of nurses and caregivers (a shortfall expected to reach about 380,000 workers by 2025), and a strong incentive for employers to automate what they do.87 That is why robots like Paro, the therapeutic robotic seal mentioned before, as well as Robear, which can lift immobile patients from bath to bed, and Palro, a humanoid that can lead a dance class, are being developed and embraced in Japan, whereas elsewhere they are viewed with detached bemusement and disapproval.88 This story is, in fact, a general one: countries that are aging faster tend to invest more in automation.

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If that were to happen, the official unemployment rate would actually fall: since those people were no longer searching for work, they would not count as being unemployed for the purposes of that statistic. It is important, then, to also pay attention to what is known as the “participation rate”: the percentage of people in the entire working-age population (not just those actively in the labor market) who are employed. In the United States today, for instance, the unemployment rate is an impressively low 3.7 percent. At the same time, however, the participation rate has collapsed, falling to its lowest level since 1977. More and more working-age Americans, it appears, are abandoning the world of work altogether—and that should be a cause for alarm.35 Similarly, in the future, we should be cautious about focusing exclusively on the unemployment rate, and keep an eye on the participation rate as well.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

Before the COVID crisis, they had relatively lower public debt levels of around 50–55 percent,22 with much of it invested in infrastructure (though during the COVID crisis, the debt level increased by about 10 percent). Some of these countries can be considered to have a demographic dividend, meaning a population with an average age in the low twenties, that is, heavily skewed toward younger generations. This type of population pyramid could make repaying debt more feasible if the coming surge in their working-age population is complemented by an equally high surge in available jobs. (The latter, however, has proven problematic in some Arab and African economies. Faced with a job shortage, a demographic dividend can rather turn into a ticking time bomb.23, 24) How some ageing Western countries are supposed to repay their debts in a slowing economy, though, is highly questionable.

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Many of them walked for weeks to their home provinces, in the hopes of being better off there during the crisis. But the long journey brought many additional problems, not in the least for their physical health and safety. Yet there are also a few reasons to remain optimistic about India in the longer term. The country will soon have the largest working-age population in the world (25 years old on average), and its government has done away with some of the biggest impediments to growth. The Licence Raj, which effectively rationed supplies and limited competition for many goods before, was abolished, and more steps toward a unified internal market are underway.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

Before the COVID crisis, they had relatively lower public debt levels of around 50–55 percent,22 with much of it invested in infrastructure (though during the COVID crisis, the debt level increased by about 10 percent). Some of these countries can be considered to have a demographic dividend, meaning a population with an average age in the low twenties, that is, heavily skewed toward younger generations. This type of population pyramid could make repaying debt more feasible if the coming surge in their working-age population is complemented by an equally high surge in available jobs. (The latter, however, has proven problematic in some Arab and African economies. Faced with a job shortage, a demographic dividend can rather turn into a ticking time bomb.23, 24) How some ageing Western countries are supposed to repay their debts in a slowing economy, though, is highly questionable.

…

Many of them walked for weeks to their home provinces, in the hopes of being better off there during the crisis. But the long journey brought many additional problems, not in the least for their physical health and safety. Yet there are also a few reasons to remain optimistic about India in the longer term. The country will soon have the largest working-age population in the world (25 years old on average), and its government has done away with some of the biggest impediments to growth. The Licence Raj, which effectively rationed supplies and limited competition for many goods before, was abolished, and more steps toward a unified internal market are underway.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

How did Japan get itself into a seemingly permanent recession after the dazzling prosperity of the 1980s? Longman told a San Francisco audience:Japan boomed through the end of the 1980s, so long as declining fertility was still increasing the relative size of its working-age population. . . . Japan’s long recession began just as continuously falling fertility rates at last caused its working-age population to begin shrinking in relative size. Because Japan welcomes no immigrants, it is facing the world’s worst elder-care crisis. At Global Business Network, we predict that Japan’s standard solution to labor problems will be applied.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

Technological progress allows the existing inputs of workers and capital to be used more efficiently. An increase in output due to technology is referred to as total factor productivity (TFP) in economic growth models. Physical capital as well as human capital – the skills and education of workers – are central to this model. It’s especially pressing for rich countries, where the working-age population is ageing or even shrinking and having better-skilled workers is even more important. How to raise productivity lies at the heart of whether or not we’re doomed to a stagnant future. What would Robert Solow, whose pioneering work has helped us to understand what generates economic growth, make of the prospect of low productivity and a slow-growth future for major economies?

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Time is seemingly a luxury for Japan’s leaders, yet it’s the very thing that they need to turn around an economy that’s been struggling for decades, during which Japan has fallen from the world’s second largest economy to its third. The country that overtook it also faces slower growth and an ageing population. For a middle-income country, China has a demographic profile that is similar to rich nations. Its working-age population is shrinking, though it has ended its ‘one child policy’ to counter the ageing demography. Also, if Britain and America as well as Japan are counting on innovation to keep them rich, China needs to get there before its growth slows down, as discussed in previous chapters. For Europe, the focus is also growth, and a lot is hanging on the governments’ ability to deliver.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

Technological progress allows the existing inputs of workers and capital to be used more efficiently. An increase in output due to technology is referred to as total factor productivity (TFP) in economic growth models. Physical capital as well as human capital – the skills and education of workers – are central to this model. It’s especially pressing for rich countries, where the working-age population is ageing or even shrinking and having better-skilled workers is even more important. How to raise productivity lies at the heart of whether or not we’re doomed to a stagnant future. What would Robert Solow, whose pioneering work has helped us to understand what generates economic growth, make of the prospect of low productivity and a slow-growth future for major economies?

…

Time is seemingly a luxury for Japan’s leaders, yet it’s the very thing that they need to turn around an economy that’s been struggling for decades, during which Japan has fallen from the world’s second largest economy to its third. The country that overtook it also faces slower growth and an ageing population. For a middle-income country, China has a demographic profile that is similar to rich nations. Its working-age population is shrinking, though it has ended its ‘one child policy’ to counter the ageing demography. Also, if Britain and America as well as Japan are counting on innovation to keep them rich, China needs to get there before its growth slows down, as discussed in previous chapters. For Europe, the focus is also growth, and a lot is hanging on the governments’ ability to deliver.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis
by Beth Macy
Published 15 Aug 2022

“They are very independent mountain people who will just tell you to go to hell and walk out!” a former manager told me. But after most of the furniture and textile mill jobs moved to Mexico, then to Asia, the largest employers became the schools, the hospitals, and Walmart. By 2019, only 52 percent of the working-age population had jobs at all, a rate 12 percent below the national average and 10 percent below the state’s. In previous years, Surry County pharmacies sold 55 million opioids between 2006 and 2014—enough for every man, woman, and child to annually consume 83 pills, a rate more than double that of the pharmacies located in surrounding counties.

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: Beth Macy, Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town (New York: Little Brown, and Company), 2014, 138. the largest employers became: Surry County Economic Development Partnership, “Data and Demographics,” (n.d.), https://www.surryedp.com/surry-county-demographics/. 52 percent of the working-age population had jobs and 500 job openings: Mark Willis, author interview, November 14, 2019. 55 million opioids: “Drilling into the DEA’s pain pill database,” Washington Post, updated January 17, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/dea-pain-pill-database/. perniciously entwined: Alan B.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

A key catalyst of instability and social resentment, inequality has surged across Western nations in recent decades, and nowhere more so than in the United States. Between 1980 and 2021 the share of national income earned by the top 1 percent has almost doubled and now sits just under 50 percent. Wealth is ever more concentrated in a tiny clique. Government policy, a shrinking working-age population, stalling educational levels, and decelerating long-term growth have all contributed to decisively more unequal societies. Forty million people in the United States live in poverty, and more than five million live in “Third World conditions”—all within the world’s richest economy. These are especially worrying trends when you consider persistent relationships between social immobility, widening inequality, and political violence.

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As the ratio of workers to retirees shifts and the labor force dwindles, economies will simply not be able to function at their present levels. In other words, without new technologies it will be impossible to maintain living standards. This is a global problem. Countries including Japan, Germany, Italy, Russia, and South Korea are even now approaching a crisis of working-age population. More surprising perhaps is that by the 2050s countries like India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Turkey will be in a similar position. China is a major part of the story of technology in the coming decades, but by the century’s end the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences predicts the country could have only 600 million people, a staggering reversal of nearly a century’s population increases.

Paint Your Town Red
by Matthew Brown
Published 14 Jun 2021

Rural areas of the country experience their own mix of problems including depopulation and lack of transport infrastructure, in addition to structural unemployment and poverty. Although city-regions have become a major focus of economic development intervention, the ability of regional capitals to create sufficient new jobs to provide the additional employment required for residents outside the city and its suburbs is questionable. In addition, the shift of working-age population from towns and rural areas to cities creates problems of its own as the high-street economy of towns collapses, local transport services are withdrawn through lack of use, and older people see their children and grandchildren forced to relocate hundreds of miles away. Over the last 30 years, economic and social exclusion in the UK has risen significantly.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey Sachs
Published 1 Jan 2008

The surprising fact is that the social-welfare states have an even higher employment rate (number of workers as a share of the working-age population) than the free-market countries. The free-market countries in turn have a higher employment rate than the mixed economies. The key here is that the social-welfare states have very high rates of female labor-force participation. The social-welfare system ensures day care and schooling for the children, so mothers have the time and means to enter the labor market. The social-welfare states have been successful in maintaining very high employment rates for two other reasons. First, social support for the working-age population has been tied to specific policies that require those receiving benefits to seek employment with the assistance of government programs.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

Second was the influence of New Deal legislation, both in reducing hours directly and also in empowering labor unions that fought for and achieved the eight-hour workday and forty-hour work week by the end of the 1930s. An unrelated factor was the baby boom of 1947 to 1964, which increased the child population (0–16) relative to the working-age population (16–64) and thus reduced the ratio of hours worked to the total population. The reverse feedback from productivity growth to shrinking hours reflects the standard view in labor economics that as real income rises, individuals choose not to spend all their extra income on market goods and services, but rather consume a portion of it in the form of extra leisure—that is to say, by working fewer hours.

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The retirement of the baby boomers will reduce hours per person independently of any other cause over a long transition period extending from 2008 to 2034. There is more to the demographic headwind, however, than the retirement of the baby boomers. The labor force participation rate (L/N) fell from 66.0 percent in 2007 to 62.9 percent for the full year 2014 and further to 62.6 percent in June 2015. Because the working-age population is 250 million, the decline in L/N by 3.4 percentage points (66.0 minus 62.6) implies a loss of 8.5 million jobs, most of them permanently. Economic research has concluded that about half the decline in the participation rate was caused by the retirement of the baby boomers and the rest by a decline in the participation of those younger than 55.

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Policy solutions include immigration, to raise the number of tax-paying workers, together with tax reforms that would raise revenue and improve tax equity. A carbon tax, desirable on environmental grounds to reduce carbon emissions, has the side benefit of generating substantial revenue to help alleviate the fiscal headwind. Immigration Reform of immigration can be accomplished in a way that raises the average skill level of the working-age population and that thus contributes to the growth of labor productivity. One avenue for reform would be to end the practice of denying residency to foreign-born graduates of U.S. universities, a “self-imposed brain drain.” A promising tool to promote high-skilled immigration and raise the average quality of the U.S. labor force would be one such as the Canadian point-based immigration system, in which a point calculator is used to rate each immigrant applicant based on his or her level of education, language skills, and previous employment experience, among other criteria.18 The definition of skills could be broad and could include blue-collar skills, many of which are currently in short supply in the U.S.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History
by Diane Coyle
Published 23 Feb 2014

When applied to actual GDP data, the results were mildly embarrassing for the theory, because studies revealed that the great majority of postwar GDP growth was “explained” by the “technical progress,” that is, by the one part of the theory that had no economic explanation. Technical progress was treated in this growth model as manna from heaven. Business investment created new capital to use in production. Labor grew by an increasing working-age population and, as the growth models became more refined, the increasing level of education and skill in the workforce. Both contributed to growth, but “technology” explained more. These simple theories seemed to fit what was known about the recent experience of GDP growth around the world. The pattern of growth in the OEEC/OECD economies in the postwar decades clearly showed the dramatic catch-up by the devastated combatant countries and the relative decline in the United Kingdom (although it too grew at a rate that would later come to be regarded as a Golden Age phenomenon).

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

Driven by construction, power generation, and manufacturing (and tourism in Sikkim’s Himalayan region), both states have been growing by 12 percent to 25 percent per year. Goa has also grown by double digits on the back of mining and tourism. India is expanding its tax base from the paltry level of 10 percent—just in time as its working-age population expands (and is not expected to peak until 2030). The combination of the goods and services (GST) tax and demonetization has formalized much of the gray economy and weakened the black market. With a stable currency and inflation in check, India has lowered its current account deficit to just 1 percent of GDP.

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South Korea currently leads the world in industrial robotics, with nearly 500 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers compared to 300 in Japan and Germany and just 36 in China. South Korean workers can also wear exoskeleton bodysuits that allow them to perform more difficult tasks for longer periods with less physical stress. As its working-age population shrinks through aging from 1 billion people in 2015 toward 900 million by 2030, China is spending massively on industrial automation to plug its growing labor gap, buying both the machines and the foreign companies that make them. In 2017, the Chinese appliance giant Midea paid $6 billion for more than 85 percent of Germany’s Kuka Robotics, one of the biggest makers of industrial robots in the world.

The Flat White Economy
by Douglas McWilliams
Published 15 Feb 2015

A regional breakdown of attitudes to entrepreneurship in 2005 suggests that the North East and North West are slightly less entrepreneurial than other English regions. Evidence from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey for 2006 suggests that the northern regions have lower proportions of their working-age population engaged in business start-ups than the UK average”. My instinctive assessment of public spending is that it is a very weak rod to encourage business activity, partly because of the reasons set out by the left-wing think tank but also because the spending tends to have political rather than economic objectives (especially in the UK – bizarrely, it seems to work better in some other countries where a degree of corruption seems to generate a higher degree of harmony between political and economic objectives!).

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity
by Kwasi Kwarteng , Priti Patel , Dominic Raab , Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss
Published 12 Sep 2012

As only 40 per cent of young people attend secondary school, large swathes of the population, often the poorest in society, lack the opportunity to get ahead.84 Yet in spite of all these deficiencies, India’s economy will grow consistently in the coming years.85 Building the Pyramid There are 2.4 million people working in the UK with a science of tech degree. That is a larger proportion of the working-age population than in the US, Germany or Japan.86 Yet the strong results are not translating into a mass movement. There is a column of talent rather than a pyramid. The top performers are a large proportion of the total number of students. For example, last year just over 75,000 students took an A Level in maths, broadly the same as the total number of undergraduates in maths and the physical sciences.87 If this strength was used to its full potential, the country would be able to fulfil all its requirements with thousands of engineers and computer experts.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

A significant minority—about one in seven—adopts the ‘upper middle class’ description. This is quite similar to the estimates of class size generated by most sociologists, who tend to define the upper middle class as one composed of professionals and managers, or around 15–20 percent of the working-age population. These self-definitions are a useful starting point, providing some sense of how people see themselves on the class ladder. But for analytical purposes, we need a more objective, and measurable, yardstick. But which to choose? After all, I’ve been at pains to argue that class is made up of a subtle, shifting blend of economic, social, educational, and attitudinal factors.

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders
by Jason L. Riley
Published 14 May 2008

It’s usually warmer at home and less expensive to live, and you are likely to be surrounded by a network of supportive family and friends.” Jacoby is spot-on, according to the economic data used to gauge an immigrant’s intentions. The labor force participation rate, which measures the percent of the working-age population that is employed or seeking employment, is the strongest indication that immigrants come here to work and not to idle. Among foreign nationals generally, labor participation rates are higher than that of natives (69 percent versus 66 percent in 2006) and jobless rates are lower (4.0 percent versus 4.7 percent in 2006).

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
by Morgan Housel
Published 7 Sep 2020

Other than clinging to a new narrative, we had an identical—if not greater—capacity for wealth and growth in 2009 as we did in 2007. Yet the economy suffered its worst hit in 80 years. This is different from, say, Germany in 1945, whose manufacturing base had been obliterated. Or Japan in the 2000s, whose working-age population was shrinking. That’s tangible economic damage. In 2009 we inflicted narrative damage on ourselves, and it was vicious. It’s one of the most potent economic forces that exists. When we think about the growth of economies, businesses, investments and careers, we tend to think about tangible things—how much stuff do we have and what are we capable of?

China's Future
by David Shambaugh
Published 11 Mar 2016

An aging labor force will compel changes in this economic model and may make political rule more difficult.”46 Wang Feng further argues, “As the population ages, the momentum of negative growth will eventually predominate.”47 Figure 3.8 China’s Demographic Projections Source: United Nations World Population Prospects (2015). This is not only a future problem; it has arrived. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the working-age population has already begun to shrink—from 941 million in 2011 to 916 million in 2014.48 Between 2016 and 2026 the number of workers aged twenty to twenty-nine will fall by nearly 25 percent from 200 million to 150 million; the drop will be even sharper for those aged twenty to twenty-four.49 By 2050 the labor force is estimated by McKinsey & Company to contract by 11 percent.50 These trends are going to have profound implications for China’s economy.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies
by Cesar Hidalgo
Published 1 Jun 2015

Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change,” Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5 (1990): S71–S102. 11. N. G. Mankiw, D. Romer, and D. N. Weil, “A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 2 (1992): 407–437. 12. They used the average percentage of the working-age population in secondary school for the period 1960–1985. 13. A. W. Woolley, C. F. Chabris, A. Pentland, N. Hashmi, and T. W. Malone, “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups,” Science 29, vol. 330, no. 6004 (2010): 686–688, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6004/686. 14.

Brave New World of Work
by Ulrich Beck
Published 15 Jan 2000

In Britain, for instance, the number of people economically active in agriculture fell dramatically between 1780 and 1988, and from 50 per cent to 2.2 per cent of all paid employment. At the same time, labour productivity soared by a factor of 68, and there was a huge accompanying consolidation of first the industrial sector and then services, which allowed a growing working-age population to be integrated into the labour market. The history of paid employment in all of the early industrialized countries looks similar right up to the 1970s. In the United States, dramatic technological change in the twentieth century led to a sweeping reduction in the numbers engaged in agriculture, but the total number of jobs in the US economy shot up from approximately 27 million in 1900 to 124.5 million in 1993.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

, according to a 2012 survey by Zipcar.51 The degree to which this is making a virtue of necessity — perhaps Millennials cannot afford cars and fuel as easily as older, more well-situated, generations, and so choose to embrace their relative poverty — is unclear, though demographics, attitudes, and other external factors all play a role.52 53 Changing Nature of Work The workforce in the US has continued its drop as technology-enabled productivity reduces the economic value of older and unskilled workers. While the total size of the workforce is at this writing higher than it was at the depth of the Great Recession, a smaller share of the working age population works today.54 Fewer people are traveling for work, and fewer discretionary trips are made by both workers nervous about spending money and the unemployed who have little or no money to spend. Starting in 2008 in the US, unemployment increased sharply, and though it has since declined, employment participation rates remain much lower as shown in Figure 3.2.55 Demographics are also part of this.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 14 Sep 2020

.”* Card similarly tackled a supply and demand question in his 1990 paper “The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market.” What he found was that the impact was, in one sense, profound. The size of the labor force in the Miami metropolitan area increased by 7 or 8 percent within six months. By contrast, the total US working age population has increased by only about 4 percent over the past ten years. And the impact on the low-skill workforce in Miami was even more dramatic than that. Fifty-six percent of the Marielitos had no high school education and a further 9 percent hadn’t completed the twelfth grade. Cuba, in other words, wasn’t sending its best people.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler
Published 11 Jun 2018

Around 45% of accountants, 50% of IT workers, and 70% of truck drivers were working for contractors rather than as employees at the companies for which they provided services.7 And the number of temp workers in the United States was on its way to an all-time high. By 2016, 20% to 30% of the working-age population in the United States and European Union had engaged in freelance work.8 Add part-time work to the mix, and some estimates put the percentage of the US workforce that did not have a full-time job as high as 40%.9 Uber merely took a trend among corporations—employing as few people as possible—and adapted it for the smartphone era.

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business
by Edward Tse
Published 13 Jul 2015

By 2013, that average had risen to $700, on a par with Malaysia’s, and more than one-third higher than Mexico’s. Making matters harder, the country’s workforce is shrinking. Through the rest of this decade, the decline will be modest, with China’s working population falling by between 2 and 4 million people annually—barely noticeable in a total working-age population of 900 million. But after 2020, thanks to the country’s one-child family policy introduced in the late 1970s, the numbers will fall precipitously as the workforce falls to 650 million by midcentury. Productivity will have to rise sharply if China is to stay competitive. Rising standards of education, discussed later in this chapter, will help, but so will new ways of organizing workforces, such as the platform-based system that Zhang Ruimin is experimenting with at Haier.

Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives
by Chris Bruntlett and Melissa Bruntlett
Published 28 Jun 2021

Together they collaborated on a report in 2019, Inequalities in Mobility and Access in the UK Transport System, which surveyed over 8,000 individuals to examine the relationship between transport and social exclusion. Their findings were nothing short of eye-opening. Two-thirds of the elderly (7.8 million people aged 60+) could not reach a hospital by public transport within 30 minutes. One-fifth of the working-age population (6.8 million people) could not reach a single large employment center by public transport within 45 minutes, compared to just 2.7 percent for those who traveled by cars. On average, car users could reach double the number of job centers as public transport users, in the same journey time.

Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 25 Nov 2008

Only then, David says, did people adjust toward lower fertility. “And the children who had unexpectedly survived formed a ‘boom generation.’” This generation created a large number of young, enterprising workers, who themselves had fewer children and therefore few dependants—in fact East Asia’s working-age population at this time grew nearly four times faster than its dependent population. The economies in the region as a result had to spend a lower percentage of their incomes on the social costs of a dependent population. Lower costs meant that this generation could save more—we have seen this in India, where a larger working population has helped push the country’s savings rate as a proportion of GDP to 34 percent in 2008, and it is set to rise even higher to 40 percent by 2015.

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China’s birth control policies have thus created an especially fast-paced demographic shift in the country, a steep slope all the way down. A dividend that took a century to complete its arc in other countries has taken less than forty years here, and dependency is now set to explode. After 2010 China’s working-age population will start falling. The country “is becoming gray before it has become rich”—by 2040, the world’s second largest population after India will be Chinese pensioners, more than 400 million people!22 Across the border in India, however, there was a far more languorous shift. India’s politics ensured that its coercive family planning program failed spectacularly, and since the 1970s the demographic curves of these two once similar countries diverged rapidly.

Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity
by Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm
Published 18 May 2022

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009151405.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press Before the Welfare State 51 insurance areas – unemployment, health, and pensions – were grossly under-provided. MASs experienced their heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period during which they counted perhaps as much as 50 percent of the working-age population as members. However, by the eve of the democratic revolution in the early twentieth century, when industrialization, urbanization, and longer life expectancy multiplied risks, MASs were in decline. The democratic state soon offered a superior alternative to MASs for a majority of workers by devising state-sponsored and enforced plans.

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Nondiscrimination regulation protects those at high risk, but it simultaneously constrains those at low risk, and risks are correlated with politically salient socioeconomic divisions. The Republican Party in the USA, for example, is committed to repealing not only the ACA but also GINA. In general, most current genetic tests identify tail-end risks that the majority need not worry about, at least among the working-age population (and again, many insurers turn away people above a certain age anyway). Freedom to share information is logically compatible with strict laws to protect privacy, and combining the two may prove to be a winning policy mix. If so, segmentation of insurance markets will proceed unabated. the choice between public and private health insurance In the “Innovations in Underwriting Practices” section, we described how the information revolution influences underwriting practices in life insurance.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

This is the distribution problem, which is seen by many as the most severe problem raised by the economic singularity. Tackling it successfully will also solve the problem of economic contraction, so we can move right along. 5.2 – Distribution At the height of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, unemployment reached 25% of the working-age population.[ccxciv] Social security arrangements were primitive then, and developed societies were much poorer than they are today, so that level of joblessness was much harder on people than it is today, when parts of Europe have returned to similar levels overall,[ccxcv] with youth unemployment hitting 50% in some places.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl
Published 7 May 2018

Indeed, a more realistic consensus (at least as regards industry size) appears to be emerging at the time of writing. Several studies using a range of methodologies, from traditional surveys to an analysis of bank accounts to determine where income is derived from, have homed in on a figure of approximately 4 per cent of the working-age population both in the United States and the UK.18 A report by the RSA, a UK think tank, published in spring 2017 simi- larly estimates that there are currently 1.1 million gig workers in the UK and that approximately ‘3 per cent of adults aged 15+ have tried gig work of some form, which equates to as many as 1.6 million adults’.19 From an overall labour-market perspective, these numbers don’t necessarily sound like a major concern—until we consider the fact that most serious attempts at measuring the size of gig work in the broader labour market * * * Understanding the Gig Economy 17 tend to understate its extent.

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain
by James Bloodworth
Published 1 Mar 2018

And there were a few positive glimmers amidst the shower of negativity. Overall, though, there were around three times as many one-star reviews as there were five-star reviews. What was certainly true was that the care sector as a whole was desperate for staff. In Britain today, an ageing population co-exists alongside a harried and stressed-out working-age population. The pressure on the latter to make ends meet by toiling away for longer and longer hours makes it increasingly difficult to take the time out to look after parents and grandparents, who are living for longer. Around one in three babies born after 2013 will live to be 100. Meanwhile, British employees work some of the longest hours in Europe.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

This is perhaps the crowning achievement of our species – nowhere else in nature do the old outnumber the young. While certainly welcome, such a shift brings with it numerous problems, not least that living longer, while having fewer children, imperils forms of collective insurance which presume a larger ‘working age’ population than dependents. Indeed, those first two conditions have, in many countries, already been met and are presently going global. What remains uncertain is whether public pensions and socialised elderly care will be viable in the future. If not, it would be ironic: capitalist affluence means more of us reach old age, yet many would lack the resources to be cared for.

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos
by Sarah Lacy
Published 6 Jan 2011

Consumer spending in Africa is $860 bil ion, which is expected to grow to $1.4 tril ion by 2020. Approximately 128 mil ion African households wil become wealthy enough to have discretionary income by the same year. By 2030, 50 percent of them wil be living in cities, and by 2040, 1.1 bil ion Africans wil be of working age—the largest working-age population on the planet. Already the discretionary household spending there is larger than it is in India or Russia.6 Despite huge political, human rights, poverty, and health issues that stil roil the continent, in pockets like Rwanda, real progress is being made. More people are safe, more people have access to jobs, and more African countries and companies are getting foreign investment, according to a 2010 McKinsey report that says, “Global business cannot afford to ignore the potential.”7 Structural changes in economies like lowering inflation, trimming debts, privatizing state-owned companies, cutting taxes, and strengthening legal systems have given birth to a nascent private sector where productivity is no longer declining; it is now rising nearly 3 percent annual y since 2000.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
by Kimberly Clausing
Published 4 Mar 2019

To produce these labor-intensive goods here, we would need to move labor away from its current occupations and toward those industries where we would no longer be importing goods. Figure 3.1: Labor Force Participation is Not Driven Down by Imports Notes: Data show labor force participation relative to the working-age population. Data sources: Federal Reserve Economic Data; World Development Indicators, World Bank. Which industries would shrink as a result, and would that be a good thing? Natural candidates would be export industries, since the very policies that reduced our imports would also reduce our exports.

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining
by James Meek
Published 5 Mar 2019

Five hunts – the Atherstone, the Belvoir, the Cottesmore, the Quorn and the Fernie – still go through the motions of chasing foxes within the bounds of the law. In bleaker districts of small post-industrial towns like Coalville and Loughborough, there is poverty, low wages and anomie. Demographically it’s a whiter, older world; its population is growing much more slowly than Leicester’s, and that growth is among the elderly. The working-age population is shrinking. The number of over-eighty-fives is forecast to grow by 187 per cent by the late 2030s. All seven of its MPs are Conservative, among them Nicky Morgan, the chair of the Treasury Select Committee. It voted, narrowly, to leave. If there was to be a transformation in the way Leicestershire’s million people were to be helped to good health, there had to be a plan, and an organisation to carry it out.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

Japan is a harbinger of this trend. Its population has been declining since 2011 and by 2050 may have shrunk by 30 million, almost a quarter. In Japan, as in many other countries with rapid ageing and declining fertility, a growing number of the retired elderly will need to be supported by a shrinking working-age population. Low-skill jobs that are difficult to automate – in areas like home care or hospitality – will become even more difficult to fill, leading to chronic job shortages. Allowing this to occur while billions in the developing world are desperately seeking employment would be absurd. Across rich countries, immigrants have been demonized in recent years for supposedly stealing good jobs, but they are not to blame for the hollowing out of the middle class.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
Published 27 Feb 2017

Innovation thus becomes something more and more foreign to most American workers, embedded in tech devices but not something that most directly observe and participate in. Furthermore, virtually all analysts expect the percentage of the workforce employed in manufacturing to decline, further insulating American workers from direct experience of significant economic dynamism.16 If we adjust for increases in the American working-age population, the United States creates 25 percent fewer triadic patents per person than it did in 1999.17 (A triadic patent is one filed in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and tends to be a relatively serious patent in terms of potential scope.) This measured decline comes in an age where an increasing number of trivial, ridiculous, or “trolling” patents are granted by an out-of-control patenting process; one-click shopping, however fun and easy it may be to do, should not be receiving patent protection.

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall
by Peter Millar
Published 1 Oct 2009

In 1952 at Stalin’s behest, the East Germans built a fortified fence along the border with West Germany and equipped it with watchtowers, armed guards, dogs and eventually automatically triggered machine guns. But there was still nothing to stop people wandering into the Western sectors of Berlin and not coming back. By 1960 the working-age population of East Germany had dropped from seventy to sixty per cent of the total. Before long it would be empty of all but geriatrics and the disabled. People denied a genuine vote at the ballot box were voting with their feet. On June 15th, 1961 Walter Ulbricht, the general secretary of the East German Communist Party (officially the Socialist Unity Party since a forced merger with the Social Democrats in 1946) gave a speech in which he famously said: ‘Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten.

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture
by David Boyle and Andrew Simms
Published 14 Jun 2009

But the attitude of conventional economics to this unmarketable, unwaged work is corrosive. Once it drops out of the conventional economic system, it becomes invisible to policy makers, unless it can be sold and commodified. It also leads to a situation where the government believes that ‘full employment’ – or 80 per cent of the working age population in work – is a valuable objective, when their voluntary work or their work as parents might actually be more valuable to the neighbourhood. There are costs – social and economic – of everyone being at work.20 It would mean, for example, that with no one at home except the frail and elderly, there is a gap left among those who socialize our children, look after older people, prevent crime and provide the human face of our neighbourhoods and communities.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

In fact, the asset price inflation of the pre-crisis period and the large profits generated by the finance sector disguised a long-standing slowdown in other parts of the economy. Some have argued that this can be attributed to a slowdown in technological change.21 Others point to demographic change — falling birth rates and rising life expectancies associated with rising affluence in the global North have led to a fall in the working age population that is depressing long-term growth rates.22 But all those who support the secular stagnation hypothesis converge on one point: without extraordinary interventions from the state such as quantitative easing, many economies in the global North appear to have ground to a halt. Today’s economists have all converged on one burning question: What is going on?

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
by Oded Galor
Published 22 Mar 2022

In other words, a region with 50 million people and an income of $10,000 per capita emits significantly more carbon than a region with 10 million people and an income of $50,000 per capita, despite the fact that the two regions have precisely the same aggregate income. This implies that economic growth fuelled by a decline in fertility rates – growth arising due to an increase in the relative size of the working-age population (known in the economic discipline as a ‘demographic dividend’) – would permit significant reductions in the projected level of carbon emissions. In fact, the decline in fertility rates since the onset of the Demographic Transition has been reducing the burden of exponential population growth on the environment.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline
by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
Published 5 Feb 2019

Although Africa is our cradle, the place we all come from, it is also young, with a median age of only nineteen, compared to forty-two for Europe and thirty-five for North America.180 In the coming decades, Africa is expected to be the only region in the world that will significantly increase its working-age population. On this, everyone agrees: between now and mid-century, Africa will grow both its population and its economy. Kenya, which wants to become a regional business hub for international companies chasing opportunities in Africa, is in a race for modernity with its continental competitors. That upgraded airport was all about winning that race.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

After the financial crisis, the economy was sustained through massive government investment, but since it was not supplemented by increased productivity and innovation, ever more money is needed to get any growth out of it. After rising 1.1 per cent annually from 1982 to 2010, growth in total factor productivity (what you can squeeze out of the resources you use) declined by 0.6 per cent during the period 2011–2019.21 In addition, the working-age population is declining and any time now the population as a whole will start declining as well. China can no longer build its economy on rural farmers moving into factories, or its housing boom on more of the population moving into brand-new apartments in cities. Real estate is no longer the engine of the economy but a drain on it.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing
Published 27 Feb 2011

Although campaigns and international agencies could do more to rectify them, they will continue. However, most relevant for understanding the shaping of the global precariat are developments in the economy that is rapidly becoming the world’s largest. The Chinese state has shaped a denizen labour force unlike anything else ever created. It has a working-age population of 977 million, which will rise to 993 million by 2015. Some 200 million are rural migrants lured to the new industrial workshops where Chinese and foreign contractors act as intermediaries of household-name multinational corporations from all over the world. These migrants are the engine of the global precariat, denizens in their own country.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

By 1940 roughly a quarter of working-age Americans had at least a secondary school education and around 5 per cent had at least a bachelor’s degree; rates were higher for the younger cohorts.8 Those figures rose steadily over the next half-century; now nearly 90 per cent of working-age Americans have at least a secondary education and 41 per cent have a bachelor’s degree or more. Most other rich countries do about as well; about 39 per cent of Britons have a bachelor’s degree or better, as do 26 per cent of Germans and 46 per cent of Japanese (The average among OECD countries is about 30 per cent of the working-age population).9 Humanity spent millennia figuring out ways to augment its physical strength, through wheels and pulleys and animal-power and steam and electricity, but, in the space of just over a century, humanity suddenly mobilized an enormous share of its cognitive strength. * * * Rising skill levels enabled rapid economic growth; the second industrial revolution, built on technologies such as electricity, chemistry and the car, couldn’t have unfolded as it did without a growing pool of skilled labour.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence
by Stephen D. King
Published 17 Jun 2013

It may have been a long way away from Europe and the US but Argentina was able to take full advantage of the Royal Navy's commitment to keep international sea lanes open. New refrigerator technologies – and faster ships – meant its beef could be exported to destinations many thousands of miles away. Its working age population grew rapidly, a reflection of the Belle Époque mass migration from Europe – particularly from southern Europe – that led to equally dramatic demographic changes in the US, Canada and Australia. The growth of international financial markets, meanwhile, led to huge improvements in Argentina's capital stock.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins , Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane
Published 28 Feb 2017

This of course disguises large regional variations – in more desirable areas such as London and the South East the ratio is up to twenty times (ONS, 2015c). Recent research shows that when housing costs (including mortgage debt and rents) are included in an assessment of changing living standards since 2002, over half of UK households across the working age population have seen falling or flat living standards (Clarke et al., 2016). Figure 5.2 House prices and mortgage debt compared to income in the UK (source: ONS, Nationwide and Bank of England; data de‹ated using 2010 prices) The impact of rising housing costs is not distributed equally across populations of course.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

The resort’s problems were endemic and paradoxical. The more the economy sank, the cheaper accommodation became – holiday bed-and-breakfasts became bedsits – and the more unemployed, sick and disabled people were attracted to (or pushed into) moving there. Thirteen per cent of Blackpool’s working-age population became dependent on welfare benefits, and prescriptions for antidepressants soared. Place Is Fate Increasingly, where you were from determined your chances in life. ‘Students in Ipswich schools, especially those from disadvantaged families, are not achieving the same school exam results as they would if they lived somewhere else.’

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
by Diane Coyle
Published 29 Oct 1998

No matter how you rearrange the financing, whether lower pensions, higher contributions or saving, or a different private-public mix, the underlying demographic equation is unchanged. In economic terms the developed countries will require a shrinking active population to pay for a growing dependent population. Sticking with the economics, the most direct solution would be to in- The Weightless World 162 crease the working-age population: immigration. Some countries have long enjoyed the benefit of immigration. America was built on it. Germany has welcomed gästarbeiter when suffering labour shortages and more than done its duty by refugees. Even the UK, with a tradition of petty hostility to foreigners, has grudgingly permitted some waves of official immigration and is currently turning a blind eye to unofficial immigration from eastern Europe.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

Germany alone would need to bring in at least 500,000 migrants each year just to offset that. Population growth in the UK, too, is entirely down to international immigration, according to the Office of National Statistics – the national fertility rate is just 1.7.11 The rosiest forecasts for the next decades see Europe’s working-age population falling by one-third. Already, almost two dozen countries are getting smaller every year, from Poland to Cuba to Japan, which lost almost 450,000 people in 2018. In these countries, women have fewer than the averaged 2.1 babies that would allow for a population to remain stable. The population decline would be even steeper were it not for steadily increasing life expectancy, but it will catch up.

The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard
Published 1 Sep 2016

A slowdown in risk-taking in the aftermath of the financial crisis has had a profoundly detrimental impact on employment, median family incomes, and growth. Median family incomes (adjusted for inflation) have fallen 7 percent from 2000 to 2014.35 Workforce participation has fallen from 67 percent to 62 percent of the working-age population, a historic low.36 And productivity growth has fallen to a paltry 0.7 percent a year since 2011, far below its 2.2 percent annual long-term average (see Figure 4-3, “U.S. Productivity Growth”). In the long run, the tax revenues collected on success are small compared with the enormous value of success to the rest of society.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Yonck
Published 7 Mar 2017

By 2025, it’s estimated that 30 percent of Japan’s population will be senior citizens.3 As if this weren’t enough, Japan’s dependency ratio is skyrocketing as well. The old-age dependency ratio provides a snapshot of a nation’s population resources and demands and is calculated by dividing the population over the age of sixty-five by the working-age population. In 2010, this ratio was 36.1 percent, or 2.8 workers for each senior. By 2022 this ratio is expected to jump to 50.2 percent, or two workers supporting every senior. (Compare this to the United States in 2015 with a ratio of 22 percent, or 4.5 workers per senior.) Current projections suggest that by 2060 Japan will reach a ratio of 78.4 percent—only 1.3 Japanese workers for every senior resident.

Economists and the Powerful
by Norbert Haring , Norbert H. Ring and Niall Douglas
Published 30 Sep 2012

A higher proportion of the population lives in absolute poverty than in many European countries and in Canada – absolute poverty being defined for all countries as 40 percent of the median income of a US citizen (Smeeding 2005). The prisoner to population ratio in the US is five to ten times as high as it is in Europe. A staggering 2.3 percent of the male working age population was in jail in 2004 (Schmitt and Zipperer 2006). Until 2008, the numbers kept going up (PEW Center on the States 2008). Due to the lack of prominence given to that sort of statistics, which stand deep in the shadow of GDP, modern conventional economists on both sides of the Atlantic can sell the US as the great example to be emulated, despite its shortcomings.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources
by Geoff Hiscock
Published 23 Apr 2012

CNPC press release, “CNPC and Cupet sign expanded oil cooperative framework agreement,” 8 June 2011. 11. Rosen, Daniel H. & Hanemann, Thilo, “An American Open Door? Maximising the Benefits of Chinese Direct Investment,” Asia Society and Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars, May 2011. CHAPTER 12 Japan after the Deluge When one looks at GDP growth to working age population (defined as population aged 20–60), one gets a surprising result: Japan has actually done better than the U.S. or most European countries over the last decade. —Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, January 6, 2011 Japan may be softly receding into nonimportance in the eyes of the more strident backers of Chinese or Indian twenty-first-century economic supremacy, but its global influence remains significant.

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
by Paul Mason
Published 30 Sep 2013

Under Labour, Britain lost 1.3 million manufacturing jobs. But this was social democracy. There had to be a palliative. The scale and persistence of poverty in Britain prompted Labour to extend the benefit system into the lives of those at work, in the form of tax credits. As a result, by 2010, 9.2 million adults out of a working-age population of 37 million were receiving state tax credits, while 5.4 million people were dependent on out-of-work benefits.13 By the end of the Labour government, former Labour minister Alan Milburn would admit: ‘We still live in a country where, invariably, if you’re born poor, you die poor, just as if you go to a low-achieving school, you tend to end up in a low-achieving job.’14 Redistribution through welfare was never overtly sold as compensation for the destruction of the ‘old’ working-class lifestyle, but that’s how it was widely understood.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2009

But up north our neighbors were experiencing the “Great Canadian Slump,” as it was named by the distinguished Canadian economist Pierre Fortin.17 In 1996 Fortin compared this slump to that seen in the Great Depression of the 1930s. His measure of the two recessions was the cumulative decline from peak of the employed fraction of the working-age population. As of 1996 the Canadian economy had already suffered 30% of the cumulative decline seen in the Great Depression.18 The Depression was not all that much worse, said Fortin in 1996. It had been deeper, and it had lasted longer. He could not have known then that it would take four more years for the economy to recover.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

But this fails to take into account the fact that the British population is actually growing very slowly. There are problems with the figures available, not least because some foreign-born workers will now be British citizens, but they do give us a general picture. The British-born population of working age has only gone up by 348,000 since 1997, while the non-British born working-age population has risen by 2.4 million. Nearly a million Britons have left the country since then, and there are a staggering 5.6 million Britons living abroad: it is often for- gotten that migration is a two-way process. The bottom line is that the number of jobs going to British-born workers has gone up more than the British-born working population has increased.

Who Rules the World?
by Noam Chomsky

Its study shows that mortality sharply decreased in China during the Maoist years, “mainly a result of economic development and improvements in education and health services, especially the public hygiene movement that resulted in a sharp drop in mortality from infectious diseases.” But this progress ended with the initiation of capitalist reforms thirty years ago, and the death rate has since increased. Furthermore, China’s recent economic growth has relied substantially on a “demographic bonus,” a very large working-age population. “But the window for harvesting this bonus may close soon,” with a “profound impact on development.… Excess cheap labor supply, which is one of the major factors driving China’s economic miracle, will no longer be available.”11 Demography is only one of many serious problems ahead. And for India, the problems are even more severe.

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 30 Jun 2004

In 1999, the Germans worked on average just over 1,500 hours per year against the Americans’ nearly 2,000.74 Almost three-quarters of the population of working age in the United States was employed, compared with less than two-thirds of the Germans and French.75 (The British were once again in between, with just over 1,700 hours worked on average per year and more than 70 percent of the working-age population in employment.) However, those Europeans lucky enough to have a job are generally guaranteed a higher minimum wage and more job security. This is what we call “social” Europe—and it’s a choice. Especially in the Mediterranean societies, it leaves more time for the other good things of life: family, friends, food, recreation, la dolce vita.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

The editors and press barons, the pundits and establishment politicians, still have their power. But increasingly they look like yesterday’s men. The result was a sharp increase in turnout in certain demographics, especially among the young and poor, who went heavily for Labour. The party won among the working-age population, only losing badly among retirees who went heavily for the Conservatives. Labour’s increased turnout of its support more or less drowned the expected ‘UKIP effect’, which in part would have been a result of a long-term decline in the Labour turnout in core seats. A fifth of UKIP voters – made an offer addressing their immediate interests rather than pandering on immigration – defected to Labour.

Legacy: Gangsters, Corruption and the London Olympics
by Michael Gillard
Published 24 Jul 2019

Two years later, Wales became the UK’s first directly elected mayor, and politically benefitted from a £3.7 billion regeneration package for Canning Town, the ward he once represented, claiming the central government funds would raise residents out of poor health, low education and poverty through work opportunities. There was certainly much work to be done. ‘Deprivation is high with much of the area falling within the 2 per cent most deprived areas within England and Wales,’ a planning document revealed. ‘In recent surveys, 17 per cent of the local working-age population have a limiting long-term illness, 17.5 per cent claim income support and 49.7 per cent of 16-74 year olds were identified as having no formal qualifications,’ it continued, without the pathos of Dickens. The original regeneration plans were modified in 2005 after London won the right to host the Olympics, most of which was going to take place in Newham.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

GPIF’s first order of business was thus to try to persuade its asset managers to push the companies they owned to improve their governance structures so as to give more power to investors—to ask them to disclose more information about their businesses, to talk to their shareholders about long-term strategy, and to vote their shares with governance in mind. Focusing on social issues, or on the “S” in ESG, also seemed likely to yield substantial dividends. Japan’s birth rate had dipped below replacement levels in the mid-1970s, and Japan’s working-age population was declining faster than any other on the planet.41 Given Japan’s closed immigration policies, persuading more women to stay in the labor force was critically important to long-term economic growth. But making this happen required dealing with some deep-rooted structural problems. Many Japanese companies have a two-track employment system.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction
by Adrian Hon
Published 5 Oct 2020

It still wasn’t very healthy to live in space long-term, even in the opulence of stations like Alto Firenze, not until centrifugal gravity was perfected and made perfectly comfortable. Back on Earth, President Sun poured money into China’s health, social security, and pensions systems. Almost a quarter of the population was over sixty-five, and the working-age population had been steadily declining for a quarter of a century. While the one child policy had been repealed over two decades previously, the fertility rate was far below the level required to maintain a constant population, especially with negligible immigration. In the end, the basic maximum income policy only provided a small proportion of the funding required.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

It also asked, but did not answer, the pivotal question of how to pay for expanded services. Across developed nations, statistics expose a treacherous imbalance. Instead of going to young workers, an increasing share of the national income must preserve standards of living for retirees. The skewing gets worse every year as payrolls and working-age populations shrink and old-age liabilities balloon. If young workers do not yet resent surrendering their futures in order to bankroll retirees, they eventually will. Watch for headlines declaring generational conflict between young and old.9 Instead of moving forward, we have slipped backward. In 1960, there were five active workers for every retired and disabled worker in the United States.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
by Stephanie Kelton
Published 8 Jun 2020

Sean Dennison, “64% of Americans Aren’t Prepared for Retirement—and 48% Don’t Care,” Yahoo Finance, September 23, 2019, finance.yahoo.com/news/survey-finds-42-americans-retire-100701878.html. 14. Emmie Martin, “Here’s How Much More Expensive It Is for You to Go to College Than It Was for Your Parents,” Make It, CNBC, November 2017, www.cnbc.com/2018/05/11/how-many-americans-have-no-retirement-savings.html. 15. FRED, “Working Age Population: Aged 15–64; All Persons for the United States” (chart), Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, updated October 9, 2019, fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S. 16. Alessandro Malito, “The Retirement Crisis Is Bad for Everyone—Especially These People,” MarketWatch, August 2019, www.marketwatch.com/story/the-retirement-crisis-is-bad-for-everyone-especially-these-people-2019-04-12. 17.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic
Published 23 Sep 2019

On the other hand, the higher income that people would get, as compared with no income at all or social assistance at much lower levels, might predispose them to consume more leisure, that is to work less. It is possible that on balance the effect of UBI on work would be small; but it is also possible that society might become very polarized, with, say, some 20 percent of the working-age population choosing not to work at all. To those who would choose not to work because they found UBI sufficient we should add those who might not need to work because of the high capital incomes they inherited (as discussed in Section 2.4). This would give us a tripartite society where those at the bottom and many of those at the top would not work at all, while the middle class would.

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments
by Andrew Henderson
Published 8 Apr 2018

Some of the most important fundamentals to look for include: ● Low Per Capita GDP: Countries with low per capita GDP have room to grow, but the best combination to look for is a country with low per capita GDP where both institutions and the workforce are undergoing a transformation. ● High Population Growth: This leads to an ample working-age population, which can give a powerful boost to GDP under the right conditions. One look at a world age chart will tell you everything you need to know. The West is getting older while emerging and frontier markets have population projections that almost perfectly mirror their varying degrees of emerging status

Arrival City
by Doug Saunders
Published 22 Mar 2011

So, while immigration is not a mandatory solution to labor shortages, the combination of cash-starved governments and higher demographic costs will make it the least painful and most voter-friendly solution. According to a 2009 study by the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, the United States will require 35 million more workers than its working-age population can provide by 2030, Japan another 17 million by 2050, the European Union 80 million by 2050. Canada, even if it continues to take in 250,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year, will be short a million workers by the end of this decade.9 Even the high levels of unemployment that struck the West after the 2008 credit crisis only temporarily mitigated this long-term demographic problem.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

Several, but certainly not all, of its countries enjoy resource wealth (40 percent of the world’s gold and 90 percent of its platinum are in Africa), which, in the hands of good governments, could be invested in public infrastructure and skills. And good government is better understood: citizens know their rights much better and are holding those in power accountable with ever-rising frequency.98 Africa is also blessed with a looming demographic dividend. Its working-age population will balloon from 500 million people now to over 1.1 billion by 2040.99 If local governments can learn how to foster neighborhoods instead of slums, and if national governments can better integrate their too-small economies and build better institutions, Africans might banish extreme poverty from their midst before mid-century.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

While population projections even in the medium term are a particularly tricky proposition (and the projections change rapidly from year to year), the hope is that the global population will stabilise during this century and peak at no more than 12 billion or so (perhaps as low as 10 billion) by the end of the century and thereafter achieve a steady state of zero growth. Clearly this is an important issue in relation to the dynamics of capital accumulation. In the United States, for example, job creation since 2008 has not kept pace with the expansion of the labour force. The falling unemployment rate reflects a shrinkage in the proportion of the working-age population seeking to participate in the labour force. But whatever happens, it is pretty clear that capital accumulation in the long-term future can rely less and less upon demographic growth to sustain or impel its compound growth and that the dynamics of production, consumption and realisation of capital will have to adjust to these new demographic circumstances.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives
by Sasha Abramsky
Published 15 Mar 2013

So thinking the solution is to get more people into that labor market, that just doesn’t add up.” For sure, the Earned Income Tax Credit could push individuals into employment and help a certain number of individuals navigate their way out of poverty, but what it couldn’t do was raise the overall well-being of the entire working-age population. While EITC recipients—especially single mothers at the bottom of the income pyramid—still benefit, despite the driving down of wages, because of the additional dollars sent their way by the government, individuals not eligible for the tax credit actually end up worse off than they would have been without the program in place.

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
by Marc Levinson
Published 31 Jul 2016

While Giscard described himself as a conservative who liked change, he was wildly enthusiastic about the state’s role in building France’s first high-speed rail line, a fleet of nuclear power plants to reduce dependence, and Minitel, a video-text terminal that was installed in millions of French homes. Such projects reinforced France’s prestige as a leader in advanced technology, but they did almost nothing to boost employment: France’s working-age population grew nearly 1 percent per year between 1974 and 1981, but the number of people with jobs rose hardly at all. With 1.75 million workers unemployed by 1981, the president’s promise of a job or a training slot for every young French worker rang hollow.3 Giscard’s ineffectual performance opened the door for Mitterrand.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

Remember the questions we are trying to answer: why didn’t the typical American family see much increase in income even though productivity rose substantially, and who was reaping the benefits of rising productivity? If you think about it for a minute, you’ll see that using income growth numbers that include sheer growth in working-age population gets us completely away from those questions. Consider, for example, what happened to the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. Average income among these families fell 10 percent over the CBO period but their numbers went up about 25 percent, and their total income therefore rose about 15 percent.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
by Eric Topol
Published 1 Jan 2019

The Guangzhou Hospital is using AI, trained from 300 million records (no wonder the Economist characterized China as “the Saudi Arabia of data”) from patients across the country, for almost every part of its operation—organizing patient records, suggesting diagnoses via a WeChat bot interaction, identifying patients through facial recognition, interpreting CT scans, and operating room workflow.59 Tencent is very active in medical image diagnosis and drug discovery, and has backed the WeDoctor Group, a hospital of the future initiative. VoxelCloud, an eye-imaging interpretation company also supported by Tencent, is deploying diabetic retinopathy AI screening broadly to counter the leading cause of blindness among China’s working age population. The AI company that has gone most intensively into medicine to date is iFlytek, which is a major global player in speech recognition. In 2018, it launched an AI-powered robot called Xiaoyi that has passed China’s medical licensing examination for human physicians (with a score of 456, which was 96 points past the required level).60 With iFlytek’s robot’s ability to ingest and analyze individual patient data, it plans to integrate these capabilities with general practitioners and cancer doctors throughout China.

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
by Charles Murray
Published 1 Jan 2012

*The numerator is based on white male state and federal prisoners of all ages. The denominator is based on whites ages 18–65. Interpreting the Ratios There is no natural denominator for computing ratios of crime indicators to population. I use whites ages 18–65 as a way to think about the numbers relative to the working-age population. In contrast, the environment in Belmont changed hardly at all. The parallel numbers for Belmont were 13 in the 1974 survey and 27 in the 2004 survey. It is statistically unlikely that someone living in Belmont knew of a family with one of its men in prison even in 2004. Someone living in Fishtown was likely to know of at least one such family, and perhaps several.

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption
by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins
Published 1 Jan 2006

The offices of Chief Judge and president of the States (the legislature) are combined in the post of the island’s Bailiff, an appointment made by the British Crown, which means no clear distinction exists between the legislature and judiciary. Jersey’s sole newspaper, the Jersey Evening Post, was for many years controlled by the island’s most senior politician. There are no universities, research centers, or think tanks. Approximately one quarter of the working-age population is directly employed in the island’s offshore finance center, and most of the other residents depend on its revenues circulating through the local economy. In such conditions there is little scope for sustained critical scrutiny of what the policy makers are up to. This absence of the checks and balances required of a democratic state creates an ideal environment for incompetence and corruption, especially on a small island with a deeply embedded culture of conformism and secrecy.

Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles
by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer
Published 10 Mar 2016

Immigrants were 45% of the labour force despite being 36% of population in 2009.29 The city has a bipolar job market, where jobs are concentrated at the high end in finance and business and the low end in the service sector.30 Ethno-racial minorities, particularly immigrants, are represented at all levels, but they are clustered in the shrinking middle. US-born non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks have declining working-age populations, and the looming labour shortfall is being filled by immigrants. Ethnic economies in New York are relatively small and shifting. The Chinese economy is the largest and most enduring. I will discuss it in detail later. Ethnic/immigrant economic niches are more common, but Ethnicity and the Urban Economy 103 they also shift over time.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

Others will face similar needs: taken together, Italy, Spain and Portugal will see the number of people aged 65 or over rise by 3.2 million between 2020 and 2030 – since around 20 per cent of this age group currently needs full- or part-time assistance, this suggests 640,000 new care workers will be required. But the working-age population will decline in all these countries – so there simply may not be enough people to provide tailored late-stage care. The question inventors, medics and carers across Japan are asking is whether personalized care really needs to be given by a person – and whether robots might be the answer.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt
Published 15 Mar 2010

Aside from the problem of dealing with the complexities of different levels, duration and timing of exposure to a mix of potentially harmful substances, researchers have no ‘control group’ with whom to compare the affected population because virtually everyone is exposed (Davis 2007). Workplace health and safety The world’s working-age population, currently about 2,700 million, experiences about 1.9–2.3 million deaths per year related to occupation, according to estimates of the International Labour Organization. Of these at least 1.6 million are work-related diseases, including 600,000 cancers, which may take years or decades to develop (Takala 2003: 2).

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World
by Paul Morland
Published 10 Jan 2019

The median Chinese citizen remained in his/her twenties throughout the first forty years or so of the People’s Republic, but in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century the median age has risen by seven years.82 This is nearly three times the speed of ageing experienced in the UK and the US, and the trend will continue. Between 1975 and 2050 the number of Chinese over the age of sixty is forecast to rise sevenfold while the number of those under fourteen years will more or less halve. Those aged over sixty as a share of the population will pass the share in the United States in around 2030.83 China’s working-age population has already started to decline in absolute terms, not just as a percentage of the population. The Chinese population will continue to be extremely large at least for the rest of the twenty-first century, but we are already at the stage where one of the motors of Chinese economic growth–population growth feeding into a growing workforce–is close to shutting down.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

Britain’s first attempt at social housing was built in north Liverpool in 1869, on the advice of Britain’s first Medical Officer of Health, William Duncan (a role similar to that held by Sir Chris Whitty during the pandemic), who was one of the first people to establish a link between unsanitary housing and poor health. At the time, a third of the area’s working-age population – 86,000 people – was squashed into just over 2,000 crowded and poorly ventilated tenements, with 38,000 more crammed in cellars in crowded courts where there were open drains. It was believed that disease spread by miasma – noxious smells in the air – and not in unclean water or via rats and mice, but, thanks to the work of reformers such as Duncan and Edwin Chadwick, the middle classes became convinced of the need to make the places lived in by the country’s poorest more sanitary.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

As people grow wealthier, they are choosing to have fewer children (see Figure 7.4).37 This has been going on in rich countries for a while. The fertility rate is currently 1.5 children per woman in Germany, 1.4 children per woman in Japan, and 1.7 children per woman in the United States, in China, and in high-income countries on average.38 As a result, the working-age population is now starting to peak and decline in these countries.39 Much the same is true in poorer countries. South America’s fertility rate is now just below 2, while India’s fertility rate is at 2.2.40 Africa is the only major continent expected to still have significant population growth over this century—but as African countries grow richer, their fertility rates are likely to drop, just like everywhere else.41 Figure 7.3.

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India
by Edward Luce
Published 23 Aug 2006

They are Herculean. But equally, its advantages are colossal. India never lacks for scale. In spite of the pressures of population density, India’s clearest advantage over China and other developing countries is its demographic profile. From 2010, China’s dependency ratio—the proportion of the working-age population to the rest—will start to deteriorate. In contrast, India’s dependency ratio will continue to improve until the 2040s.34 In the next twenty years, the proportion of dependents to workers will fall from 60 percent of the population to 50 percent. This will give India’s economy a large “demographic dividend.”

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
by Jason Stearns
Published 29 Mar 2011

Under Mobutu, the price of resistance was so great that few ever dared to stand up and be counted for fear of being chopped down. Resistance to dictatorship in other countries has been most successful when it can call on strong, well-organized structures of like-minded supporters, such as labor unions, churches, or student groups. In the Congo, where in any case only 4 percent of the working-age population had jobs in the formal sector, there were few labor unions to speak of. In the early 1990s, fewer than 100,000 students in higher education were dispersed among dozens of universities and training centers across the country. Mobutu had tamed these institutions, consolidating all labor and student unions and forcefully integrating them into his ruling party.

The End of Work
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 28 Dec 1994

The regional figures are equally striking. In the next thirty years the labor force of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean is expected to grow by 52 million, or twice the number of workers as currently exist in Mexico alone. In Africa, 323 million new workers will enter the labor force over the next three decades-a working-age population larger than the current labor force of Europe. 43 Worldwide, more than a billion jobs will have to be created over the next ten years to provide an income for all the new job entrants The Fate of Nations 207 in both developing and developed nations. 44 With new information and telecommunication technologies, robotics, and automation fast eliminating jobs in every industry and sector, the likelihood of finding enough work for the hundreds of millions of new job entrants appears slim.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, former republics such as Estonia embraced Western-style reforms and thrived. Moldova, however, never managed to shake off Communist influence. After flirtations with democratic reforms in the 1990s, the party was voted back into power in 2001. Over the next decade, the economy imploded, and a quarter of the working age population left in search of work abroad. Twenty years ago Moldova was wealthier than Romania, with which it shares a language and culture. By 2010, when I visited, its per capita GDP was just a quarter of its booming neighbor’s. The previous spring, the country had reached a breaking point. After the Communists narrowly won the April 2009 election in a suspiciously strong showing, outrage turned to violence in the streets.

The Streets Were Paved With Gold
by Ken Auletta
Published 14 Jul 1980

In those years, the city lost about 25 percent of its white middle-income population (1.6 million) and gained an equal number of (mostly) poor blacks and Hispanics. In 1960, just 4 percent of the city’s population—324,000—received public assistance. By 1970, the figure was 14 percent—over 1 million people. The age composition also changed. The city’s working-age population, aged twenty-five to fifty-four, dropped from one half of all residents in 1950 to less than two-fifths. At the same time, senior citizens and youths swelled from one-third to two-fifths of the populace. New York lost its “money-providers,” as Wallace Sayre and Herbert Kaufman dubbed them in their classic Governing New York City, and gained “service demanders.”

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration
by Kent E. Calder
Published 28 Apr 2019

Japan now has nearly 70,000 centenarians11 and a population that has been dropping since 2010.12 Twenty-seven percent of its people are now over 65.13 Korea is similarly steadily graying, with a fertility rate of only 1.2 babies per woman (among the lowest on earth).14 And China’s demographic transition is impending, influenced by its longstanding one-child policy, only fully abandoned in 2015.15 By 2050 the number of births in China is projected by the US Census Bureau to be 35 percent less than in 2000, with China’s median population age rising close to 50.16 China’s total population will likely begin declining around 2025, the working-age population will fall more than 100 million workers by 2035, and before 2050 China will likely have more elderly than all the G-7 nations (North America, Europe, and Japan) combined.17 The Socioeconomic Impact of Globalization The incorporation of three billion new active participants in the world economy over the past three decades has had many positive effects, as China, ­India, Russia, and surrounding countries have at last begun interacting systematically with global markets.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

More than 44 percent of all digital-services jobs were in just ten metro areas. By one count, a mere 1 percent of the country’s job and population growth since 2008 had occurred in counties lacking a city of at least 50,000 people, which described Taylor’s county. Meanwhile, the share of the working-age population with a college degree was now 15 percentage points higher in cities than in rural areas, a gap more than a third as large as it had been in 2000. And there was no sign that these trends would slow or reverse anytime soon. A report by McKinsey Global Institute would soon predict that twenty-five cities and high-growth hubs would generate 60 percent of all job growth through 2030, while fifty-four trailing cities and rural areas, where one-fourth of Americans lived, would have zero growth.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
by Jeanna Smialek
Published 27 Feb 2023

Investigative journalist Bob Woodward dubbed him the “maestro.” One of his myriad biographies was titled The Man Who Knew.[*5] Greenspan’s cult of personality owed in part to the era he oversaw. He had been dealt a winning economic hand by history, presiding at a time of globalization hypercharged by a relatively young working-age population and big advances in computer technology, one in which laissez-faire economics and animal spirits were celebrated as engines of prosperity. Thirty years later, Powell had taken the other side of that shuffle. He had inherited an American economy facing graying demographics and a global backdrop made more tenuous by a destabilizing surge in nationalism, rampant inequality, and obvious financial vulnerabilities.

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
by Branko Milanovic
Published 9 Oct 2023

That would dampen the increase in wages; it would also increase the rate of exploitation, and might (temporarily) prevent the profit rate from falling. It is important to realize, though, that the reserve army of labor, however important in the short run, cannot be legitimately used as a deus ex machina to explain why the profit rate does not fall. The reserve army is limited in size by the working-age population. Thus, if one wants to argue against the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, one must invoke some inherent features of the system, not just the number of people left in the reserve army. We may consider, however, that with globalization the domestic reserve army is no longer relevant; so long as there are internationally enough people to be brought into the realm of global capitalist production, the wage-checking role of that additional labor will remain.

Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least
by Antti Ilmanen
Published 24 Feb 2022

Markets will not deliver a given level of returns just because you need it. Unless you adjust your spending plans, you will eventually need to spend from your capital. The broad policy issue is whether underfunded pension systems can afford paying the promised pensions in an ageing society. OECD estimates that the ratio between old-age (>65) and working-age population (20–64) rose in the US from 22% to 28% between 1990 and 2020 and will rise to 40% by 2050. Statistics look worse for the European Union: 22–34–56(%), while Japan has led the way with 19–52–81(%), and China is catching up quickly with 10–19–48(%). To be fair, I – and many other so-called experts – have been warning about low expected returns for a while, but especially the US markets kept delivering quite generous returns through the 2010s.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

‘We would hear no more about a weak economy, about being “the sick man of Europe” … What we are would speak for itself.’104 None of this is separate from the myth of ‘England alone’. Powell believed there were hereditary or, at the very least, deep-set Anglo-Saxon dispositions for orderly free markets and limited government. His obsession with the differential birth rates of ethnic groups and the make-up of the working-age population had more than a flavour of eugenics. He saw policies allowing immigration as diluting the national character with ‘communal’ values because of what he regarded as some deluded prioritisation of prosperity over national identity. Above all, he was utterly at odds with all those who saw a multicultural society as a logical consequence of being at the heart of an empire for the previous 300 years, or, as the anti-racist campaigner and novelist Ambalavaner Sivanandan put it, ‘we are here because you were there’.

India's Long Road
by Vijay Joshi
Published 21 Feb 2017

Growth of output per worker, in turn, depends on a) accumulation of physical capital per worker, b) increase in human capital per worker, and c) improvements in TFP per worker. (An important qualification is that the equivalence between growth of output per head and growth of output per worker does not quite hold in India because the country is due to receive a ‘demographic bonus’: the working-​age population is expected to increase faster than the population as a whole for the next three decades. While this ‘bonus’ lasts, output per head will grow somewhat faster than output per worker.3 So long as this is kept in mind, growth of output per worker can serve as a proxy for growth of output per head.)

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

Of course, it will not all be easy or smooth, but I refuse to be pessimistic about Africa when such an opportunity is available at a few strokes of a pen and when the evidence of entrepreneurial vitality in the extralegal sector is so strong. Besides, as its population growth rates fall, Africa is about to reap a ‘demographic dividend’ when its working-age population is large relative to both the dependent elderly and the dependent young: such a demographic bonanza gave Asia perhaps one third of its miracle of growth. The key policies for Africa are to abolish Europe’s and America’s farm subsidies, quotas and import tariffs, formalise and simplify the laws that govern business, undermine tyrants and above all encourage the growth of free-trading cities.

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century
by George Gilder
Published 30 Apr 1981

Segalman, a professor of sociology at California State University, Northridge, points out that transgenerational welfare poverty, which twenty years ago was only 5 percent of welfare recipients, now comprises 20 percent, and on the basis of statistics in Los Angeles, he predicts that this element of permanent dependency will reach 40 percent in ten years. 13 This was predicted in Alan Sweezy, “The Challenge of Social Security Financing,” ZPG National Reporter (June–July 1978). Sweezy quotes Census Bureau projections that show the proportion of the population 65 and over rising by nearly 80 percent between 1976 and 2030, while the working-age population proportion declines slightly. 14 “Hispanics Fastest Growing Minority in U.S.,” New York Times, February 18, 1979, p. 16. 15 Tom Bethell, “Against Bilingual Education,” Harper’s, vol. 258, no. 1545 (February 1979), p. 30. 16 Vincent H. Whitney, “Fertility Trends and Child Allowances” in Eveline M.

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
by Alan S. Blinder
Published 24 Jan 2013

What is saved, of course, is not spent. Until 2011, battered consumers held back the recovery. As we have noted several times, the recession took a terrible toll on jobs. Payroll employment did not bottom out until February 2010. When it did, America had 8.8 million fewer jobs than at the January 2008 peak—even though the working-age population had grown in the interim. These massive job losses shattered millions of families’ incomes, not to mention their lives. And on top of this, American taxpayers were asked to bear the costs of bailing out the very financial system that had gotten them into this mess. It didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge
by Faisal Islam
Published 28 Aug 2013

In practice, that means the flows of those Chinese migrant workers from Sichuan and other places to the coastal factories have sustainably increased the capacity of China’s economy. It was these migrant workers who were the principal reason for China’s giant surpluses. China’s increasing wealth really rests on their shoulders, more than on its currency management. But it cannot last: China’s single-child policy means that by 2015 the size of its working-age population will peak. More important than the blame game, perhaps, is what China’s growth can teach the rest of the world. As Justin Lin argues, ‘If you look at the experiences of all the successful countries in economic development – postwar Japan, Korea and Taiwan, the transition nations of China and Vietnam, or even the early development of the UK, German, US and French economies – all have relied on the market mechanism combined with active interventions of government.’

The-General-Theory-of-Employment-Interest-and-Money
by John Maynard Keynes
Published 13 Jul 2018

Obviously that turned out to be wrong. Moreover, worries about “secular stagnation”—about a shortage of investment opportunities leading to persistently low interest rates even during periods of expansion, which in turn makes depression-like episodes highly likely, even the norm—have made a comeback. With a sharp slowdown in working-age population growth in advanced economies, xlii Introduction by Paul Krugman and an apparent slowdown in productivity growth, Keynes’s bleak vision of the future absent consistent government support for demand may be coming true after all. The Economist as Saviour As an intellectual achievement, The General Theory ranks with only a handful of other works in economics—the tiny set of books that transformed our perception of the world, so that once people became aware of what those books had to say they saw everything differently.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
by Vaclav Smil
Published 2 Mar 2021

In contrast, the dividend had a more muted impact in Latin America (largely due to less effective government policies), and major African economies have yet to see these benefits, as their high fertilities have either kept their total dependency ratios from falling (Nigeria’s ratio has been steady at close to 90) or as the decline has been only from very high to high ratios (Kenya’s rate fell from more than 110 in the early 1980s to less than 80 by 2015). The demographic dividend is inherently time limited but its positive consequences can endure well beyond its end. As the large cohorts of working-age population age and retire, the dividend first recedes and then it disappears, but it can have a longer-term economic effect if the temporary gains were invested in infrastructures, education, health, and technical advances. The dependency ratio then shifts once more, rising with the increasing share of retired people and forcing countries to deal yet again with growing shares of less-productive (part-time employment among elderly) and nonproductive (retired) segments of the population.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis
by Sugrue, Thomas J.

The great irony for blacks, however, was that city government by the 1960s would not be a growth industry for much longer, as it had been in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A declining municipal tax base and growing anti-government sentiment diminished public-sector job opportunities as the black working-age population continued to grow.58 Retail Sales Blacks found very little employment in the postwar era in high-visibility jobs that involved public contact, and remained grossly underrepresented in sales jobs, compared to whites (see Appendix B). Their exclusion from retail trade was not inconsequential.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

Overall, the economic pie will grow (that’s right, folks, the ­dessert metaphors are back) but human workers will receive an ever-smaller slice. On an extreme outcome, the vast majority of people of working age could be unemployed. But the effects would be radical if even half or a third of the working-age population was unable to find work. Who Will Be the First to Go? It’s intuitive to assume that lower-educated workers will be hardesthit by technological unemployment. It currently costs about $25 an hour to pay a human welder and about $8 an hour to use a robot.9 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Technological Unemployment 299 Supermarket check-out staff face the prospect of ‘smart’ stores that run without human check-out staff and shelf-stackers.10 Truckers, of whom there are 3.5 million in the United States alone, could be superseded by self-driving vehicles that can trundle for weeks without rest.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

The combined growth of contract rentierism and platform rentierism has been substantially responsible, at any rate, for the swelling to more than 5 million by mid 2019 of the number of people in the UK who, in Delphine Strauss’s words, were in ‘low paid, insecure forms of work – including short-term work and contracts with unpredictable hours and pay – and were not earning enough to make ends meet’.67 This enlargement of the UK’s precariat is crucial in understanding what Torsten Bell and Laura Gardiner have recently described as the biggest change to the UK economy during the period since the financial crisis: the employment ‘boom’ that has seen the proportion of the working-age population in work grow from 73 to 76 per cent.68 As they explain, the main reason people are working more is that most people are ‘a lot poorer than [they] expected to be’.69 Meanwhile, at the top end of the income spectrum, those largely protected from the pressure on wages that has accompanied rentierization have added to their employment income by themselves becoming rentiers – whether or not they work at rentier institutions.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 110 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: 25 to 54 years (LNU01300060),” retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, updated April 7, 2023, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300060. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 111 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Working Age Population: Aged 25–54: All Persons for the United States (LFWA25TTUSM647N),” retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, updated April 20, 2023, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA25TTUSM647N. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 112 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate: 25 to 54 years (LNU01300060).”

Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford
Published 16 Nov 2018

Some of them will be slow, but in the scale of, say, 100 years, if something takes an extra 20 years, it’s nothing. There is going to be a problem with AI robots and employment sometime in this century, whether it’s 2030 or 2070. At some point we need to change how we structure our societies because we are going to get to a point where there’s less employment available but still a working-age population. There are counterarguments, like when most agricultural jobs disappeared they were just replaced by industrial jobs, but I don’t find them to be compelling. The main issue we will face is scale and the way that once you have a solution, you can use it everywhere relatively cheaply. Getting the first driverless car algorithm/database system that works might be 50 years of work and cost billions of dollars in research, but once we have them, people are going to roll them out at scale.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

Medieval Europe is covered more broadly by Pirenne (1937, 1952) and Wickham (2016). Postan (1966) and Barlow (1999) are also informative. In 1100, 2 million rural residents fed 2.2 million people, while in 1300, the respective numbers were 4 million feeding 5 million. If the age composition of rural areas was about the same, with a working age population of about half the total, this suggests the ratio of fed people to active agricultural workers rose from 2.2 to 2.5, a rise of agricultural productivity, crudely measured, of just under 15 percent. The building and operation of monasteries, churches, and cathedrals is from Gimpel (1983), Burton (1994), Swanson (1995), and Tellenbach (1993).

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

For the main components, see 4 fig. 4. 3 European Commission 2007, 2013, and 2015 are key reports on the scale and consequences of aging in Europe. Cf. also briefly United Nations 2015 for global trends. Fertility rates: European Commission 2007: 12 (about 1.5 now, projected to rise to about 1.6 by 2050). Median age and working age population: 13. Dependency ratios: 13 (rise to 53 percent by 2050); European Commission 2013 (rise to 51 percent by 2050) and 2015: 1 (rise to 50.1 percent by 2060). Eighty-year-olds and older: European Commission 2007: 13. Cf. 46 fig. 2.7., 49 fig. 2.9, and Hossmann et al. 2008: 8 on the range of future age pyramids.

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
by Charles Murray
Published 28 Jan 2020

The same thing happens within different kinds of STEM occupations: In 2015, two of the same authors, Rong Su and James Rounds, conducted another meta-analysis focusing on distinctions within scientific and technical occupations. Again, their database of vocational preferences and a database of actual jobs held by the U.S. working-age population produced almost interchangeable results. In both cases, the biggest sex differences favoring men involved the most Things-oriented jobs; the biggest sex differences favoring women involved the most People-oriented jobs.[46] The degree of consistency of the sex differences in vocational interests and occupations is quite remarkable.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

It could be argued that asking whether immigration restriction is racist or racially self-interested amounts to the same thing. But if the theory that the politics of immigration is about economic interests were true, it should be possible for someone to support immigration as a boost to economic growth or a country’s working-age population without thinking group-motivated restrictionists are racist. Across all countries, the majority say tribally motivated restrictions are not racist, but among pro-immigration respondents views are more evenly split: 51 per cent of pro-immigration people say the statement is racist. Education also counts.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

They form a disproportionate share of entrepreneurs; for example, in 2016, 40 percent of Fortune’s list of the 500 top US firms were owned by immigrants or Part II Authoritarian-Populist Values 177 their children.7 Advanced industrialized societies like Germany with an aging population, a shortage of skilled labor, and declining fertility rates, can expand the working-­age population, consumption, and productivity through the successful integration of young migrants.8 In America, many legal immigrants are highly educated scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs; others are young workers with little education who are employed in highly manual-­intensive occupations.9 The willingness of low-­skilled immigrants to do work involving hard physical labor fills important needs in farm-­work, building construction, home services, and food preparation.10 But the rapid influx of large numbers of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers into Europe from poorer societies generates social tensions.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
by Joseph Henrich
Published 7 Sep 2020

I’d best live in a place where I can both find out that such precision work is possible and also actually be able to locate someone to do the job. The bigger and more fluid the city or urban cluster, the better.35 To illustrate the power of the metropolis, Figure 13.2 plots the size of the working-age population in contemporary U.S. cities against their annual innovation rates, captured here using the total number of patent applications in 2002. Knowing the population of a city allows us to explain 70 percent of the variation among U.S. cities in innovation. The size of this relationship, which I’ve plotted on log scales, tells us that cities have synergy.

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards
by Antti Ilmanen
Published 4 Apr 2011

Using panel data from 22 advanced countries between 1970 and 2009, Takats (2010) estimates that both real GDP-per-capita growth and total population growth boost real house prices one for one (a 1% increase in either series raises real house prices by 1%), while aging has a negative impact (a 1% increase in the dependency ratio—the ratio between the old age population and the working age population—reduces real house prices by 0.7%). These factors are not the only drivers of house prices but they partly explain the lagging performance of Japan and Germany. More generally, the study argues that multi-decade tailwinds on housing and other asset prices are now turning into multi-decade headwinds.