By international standards, New Zealand is a small town economy. True, Auckland now has more than 1.5 million people, but by global metrics this is not very large. In 2010 there were 449 cities with more than 1 million residents, and Auckland was ranked 307 in terms of population. Small beans indeed – even if Auckland is four times as large as the next two biggest cities in New Zealand.
So how does this small size influence outcomes for New Zealanders?
Read moreThe world faces three particularly awkward economic issues over the next fifty years: how global living standards can be maintained with lower greenhouse gas emissions; how poor people in countries that still have high population growth rates can be brought out of poverty; and how the impact of population ageing in higher income nations can be managed. For more financial oriented post and other news, pop over to this site.
In this post I will discuss how the solution to these three issues can be linked. In a follow up I’ll use the example of New Zealand to show how policy settings may be making the third issue worse than it needs to be.
A new paper (PDF) claims that ageing populations will hinder growth by both dis-saving and dragging down innovation, thus reducing productivity. Using a VAR model, they relate the age structure to measures of growth, saving, investment, and other macroeconomic variables over the 1990-2007 period. They use those coefficients to predict the effect of demographic change on growth rates in the current decade. The results are dramatic, predicting that an ageing population will knock over a percentage point off some countries’ growth rates.
In a ray of light, this morning’s FT (£) reported a study of over 15,000 German employees that examined the relationship between ageing and productivity. One of the authors is quoted saying:
As workforces age, employers are concerned that productivity will decrease. That is not so. What matters is not chronological age but subjective age.
The research suggests that older people are systematically excluded from training activities, and are relegated to less creative and meaningful work, which renders them less productive. As the workforce ages, that may begin to change. As it changes, the relationship between growth and age structures is likely to weaken.
It’s taken me a month to read it but Deirdre McCloskey’s essay on Piketty’s Capital is just as persuasive as you’d expect. Print it and read it with your family over Christmas!
The review doesn’t break any new ground but it is eloquent and engaging. Her central themes are: Read more
Golden passage from Brad Delong. For once I’m going to put up a quote and not add my thoughts – as they’d just get in the way:
The focus on real GDP growth and its possible–or likely–slowing is a setup to panic us into making policy decisions we really do not want to make. The “great stagnation” literature as it is currently constituted seems to me at least to guide our attention in the wrong direction–and to quite possibly stampede us into making policy decisions we really would not want to make if we thought more deeply and calmly. The chain of logic is that measures to reduce inequality have a cost in terms of reducing the growth rate of the economy–that the bucket of redistribution is, in the terms of Arthur Okun’s Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, a leaky bucket–and that when growth is slower we can no longer afford to engage in redistribution. This seems to me to be the wrong way to conceptualize it: the evidence that the bucket is leaky is weak–or, rather, there are many buckets, some very leaky, some not leaky at all, some anti-leaky–and in any event whether we should tradeoff potential growth for other objectives is not something the depends on how fast growth is. Policies that make sense if underlying GDP per worker growth is 3% probably still make sense if underlying GDP per worker growth is 1%. Policies that don’t make sense if underlying GDP per worker growth is 1% probably still don’t make sense if underlying GDP per worker growth is 3%.
But my aim here is simply to lay down a marker as far as point is concerned: to enjoin you not to get stampeded into going someplace you really do not want to go.
Back in 1991, Larry Summers upset a lot of people as Chief Economist at the World Bank. His memo has been viewed as morally reprehensible, was cited in the second chapter of this book as indicative of the way economists ignore moral values, and was used as a key example in a philosophy class I sat in of the untenable nature of economic arguments.
But, as a description of what would happen if people in LDC’s (least developed countries) had the choice, was he actually correct?
