Earlier this morning I read this intriguing paper by US researchers Robert Drago & Amy Varner. The title of the paper is “Fertility and Work in the United States: A Policy Perspective” and it addresses the important issues of gender equality and the historical trend towards declining fertility in the United States. Now while I [...]

In one of those strange coincidences the world’s second and third largest economies are both scheduled to have elections next month - Japan on 11 September, and Germany on the 18th. The coincidences go further, since these two societies are leaders in another, non-economic, sense: they are leaders in the great global ageing revolution. Japan [...]

According to Oded Galor it has become evident that in the absence of a unified growth theory that is consistent with the entire process of development, the understanding of the contemporary growth process would be limited and distorted. He quote Copernicus to the effect that:
?It is as though an artist were to gather the hands, [...]

I suppose by-now every right thinking and reasonably well read adult knows what the ‘poverty-trap’ is, even if most of us aren’t too clear about what there is to do about it. Being stuck in one of these traps could be thought to be like being stuck in a (not necessarily very deep) well with [...]

One person who could rightly claim to know more about global ageing and its possible consequences than anyone else in the business is the German Director of the Manheim Research Institute for the Economics of Ageing Axel B?rsch-Supan. If there’s a conference being organised, he seems to be there. Actually his comments at both [...]

Last Friday Eurostat released the 2004 data on comparative per capita PPP’s (purchasing power parities) across the EU. Perhaps the most surprising fact which emerges is that Ireland is now in second place (after Luzembourg) with a PPP 40% above the EU average. For a country that not so long ago was considered one of [...]

Views of immigration are changing. Back in the mists of time, when I first came to the conclusion that ongoing demographic changes were going to be important, the voices in favour of a reconsideration of immigration policy were few and far between. Perhaps the first and most notable of these voices was the UN population [...]