That compounds the problems of shrinking workforces and rising bills for health care and pensions
special child,” says the voice-over, as the camera pans across abandoned classrooms and deserted maternity wards. “He’s the last child born in Italy.” The short film made for Plasmon, an Italian brand of baby food owned by Kraft-Heinz, a giant American firm, is set in 2050. It imagines an Italy where babies are a thing of the past. It is exaggerating for effect, of course, but not by as much as you might imagine.
South Korea may be an exceptional case, but the most recent data and projections suggest that demographic decline is becoming commonplace. In 2010 98 countries and territories recorded fertility rates below 2.1.
The obvious way to compensate for dwindling birth rates is immigration, which is on the rise throughout much of the rich world, despite the political tensions it has generated in recent years. But as demographic decline begins to affect more and more countries, educated migrants will become harder to find, even as the shrinking of the native-born population accelerates in many rich countries. For China, with a population of some 1.
Both sides agree that an ageing population will reduce both savings and investment, but disagree about which will decline more quickly. But the balance of evidence points towards lower real interest rates: many developing economies still have decades of savings accumulation ahead of them, and retirees often cling to their savings rather than running them down.
a measure of disruptiveness based on the number of citations of a given invention in future patents. If a particular patent is cited by subsequent inventors, but that patent’s technological predecessors are not, it is categorised as a disruptive rather than an incremental innovation. For instance, the work of Kary Mullis, a Nobel-prize-winning biochemist, on polymerase chain reactions forms the foundation of much modern genetic and medical testing.
Some researchers believe such a demographically driven reduction in innovation is already under way in parts of the world. James Liang, a Chinese economist and demographer, notes that entrepreneurship is markedly lower in older countries: an increase of one standard deviation in the median age in a country, equivalent to about 3.5 years, leads to a decrease of 2.5 percentage points
Looking only at the most novel fields, in which radical new innovations are most likely, makes the picture no better. In an analysis published by the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance, Antonin Bergeaud and Cyril Verluise note that Japan’s contribution to genome editing and blockchain technology has shrunk to almost nothing.
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