Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Demogscarics

The UN does what what it does best, issue press releases;
The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new United Nations report, "World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision....
Says the UN: Most of the increase will be in nine countries; India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Uganda, and the USA. Well, let's check in with the former President of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, writing from Yale  at Voxeu.org;
Even with the rapid growth of the last 15 years, vast numbers remain unemployed in Africa. This will only get worse as growth slows considering millions of young people will enter the labour market each year. The continent also still confronts extremely high poverty rates.
Five of those predicted high population growth countries are in Africa.
In low-income African countries, the informal sector generates half of national output, 80% of total employment, and 90% of new jobs. This is a problem for countries’ economic growth potential, productivity, quality of employment, income distribution, and fiscal revenues.
Of course, a politician always worries about government revenues, but;
Those in the informal sector are either self-employed or working in business units with very few people. When marginalisation from the legal system is combined with small size, the results are lack of legal identity, little or no capital, isolation from formal sources of credit and technology, and very limited markets, all resulting in very low productivity.
More people with low productive capacity into the world. That seems to be a recipe for trouble. Unless those countries change the way they do things (as China and India did). I.e., less socialism, more free exchange.

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