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Richer aging countries need educated young workers to provide the services and entrepreneurial talent to sustain their quality of life. A growing population of young, increasingly educated people in poorer countries, and especially in Africa, need good jobs and greater opportunities. More trade in s...

The ongoing global demographic transition is massive in scale and likely impact. For most of the past 200 years, the vast majority of the world’s countries have seen population growth, particularly working-age population growth. As they’ve gone through the "demographic transition" toward lower birth...

The past year has been challenging and turbulent for many frontier markets in Africa. In 2022, African economies met headwinds of inflation, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and sovereign debt challenges. This led to a decrease in demand for African goods and services, as well as reduced inve...

That said, there are reasons to doubt that a declining working age population would have a long-term effect on prices. They are based on an argument that economists have long made when it comes to migration into economies where the domestic labor force was still expanding, termed the “lump of labor ...

The world has never been more educated, our populations more connected. Technological advance in areas from solar and fusion power through batteries to satellites and cancer vaccines will help deliver sustained development. Ending extreme ($2.15 a day) poverty, while long overdue, is on a trajectory...

I'm not a huge fan of arbitrary lines through country income levels to create income thresholds. That is because there is no obvious clustering of countries within the global (country-level) income distribution, and moving from one income status to another does not correlate with trend breaks or end...

In a new paper, Zack Gehan and I present scenarios for the global economy in 2050. These scenarios build on a forecast of economic growth built around income, population, education, and temperature. The process suggests a considerable degree of uncertainty about how the world will look in three de...