“Global imbalances matter” seems to be the favoured warcry over at Brad Setser’s blog these days (I’m not sure anyone really disagrees with the idea that they matter, all the arguing seems to be about how much and why). Recently however Brad seems to be drawing support from a rather unexpected quarter: “one part [...]

According to the Financial Times this morning “Vietnam’s economy is expected to maintain rapid growth in the year ahead, after its gross domestic product last year expanded 8.45 per cent – the fastest pace of growth in nearly a decade.” This is to be added to the fact that “Economic growth in Vietnam, which averaged [...]

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

Updating on my post from yesterday, Dave Altig at MacroBlog reproduces a map (first posted by Sun Bin) of services as a component of GDP. As Dave points out China has clearly be come a significant outlier among would-be-developed economies in its reliance on manufacturing share. Even with the most recent data added in China [...]

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

… but a welcome development nonetheless (and, perhaps, a harbinger of better times to come): controversial Banca d’Italia boss Antonio Fazio decides to spend more time with his family.

Bo Malmberg is a demographer and he works at the Stockholm-based Institute For Future Studies. Evo Morales is the ‘flamante’ President of Bolivia. OK, this much is clear, now where’s the connection?
Well, Brad Delong says of Morales’ election, citing Pyrrhus of Epirus, Another Such Victory and We Are Lost, while the Financial Times informs [...]

According to the French writer Rabelais debt and deceipt are almost invariably inextricably linked. So it is appropriate that it should be a French banker - Michel Pébereau - who takes it upon himself to try to bring this harsh reality home to a French public which still seems excessively steeped in [...]

Back in July I published a post about Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz’s hypothesis that those countries which sustain total fertility rates below 1.5 for any length of time may have fallen into a self-reinforcing low-fertility trap. Old Rottenhat (Ray to his friends) argued in comments that I had explained the reasons for the existence [...]

At the present time some 66 countries have fertility rates which are below the level necessary for population replacement (TFR 2.1). Within the next decade the number of counries in this group is set to grow to the point where a majority of the world’s population will be living in regions where the existing [...]