Ideas to action: independent research for global prosperity
Development in 2050
What will the world look like in the next 25 years?
About the project
Development in 2050 presents new forecasts of how the world will look in twenty-five years, on everything from global manufacturing employment to IMF shareholding, presents optimistic and pessimistic scenarios—and explores the choices that will determine which future we get.
Featured Work
Two Futures for Global Development
Charles Kenny et al.
How Much Progress Against Poverty by 2050?
Charles Kenny et al.
Forecasting Global Growth to 2050
Charles Kenny et al.
The Future of Development: Business and Consumer Services
Charles Kenny et al.
The Perils of a Declining Labor Force
Charles Kenny et al.
Featured Work
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Two Futures for Global DevelopmentCharles Kenny et al.
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How Much Progress Against Poverty by 2050?Charles Kenny et al.
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Forecasting Global Growth to 2050Charles Kenny et al.
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The Future of Development: Business and Consumer ServicesCharles Kenny et al.
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The Perils of a Declining Labor ForceCharles Kenny et al.
The world will look different in 2050: Climate change will progress, many workforces will shrink as populations age, and emerging technologies will change the way we work and live. But what are the implications of those changes, and what can we do to shape the best possible version of our future?
In this project, Charles Kenny and other experts from CGD and beyond build a series of forecasts of different aspects of the world by 2050—projecting global growth, poverty and aid, manufacturing and services employment and the future of work, the effects of climate change, demographic transitions, and more. These forecasts explore the range of possible outcomes and sketch out several different possible versions of the future—optimistic ones where the world is more equal, prosperous, and innovative, and more pessimistic ones where it is the opposite.
Whether we end up in the more negative version of the future or the more positive one has less to do with luck than with the choices political leaders make over the coming years on a few crucial types of policies, on migration, services trade, innovation policy, aid flows, and more—as this project explores.
Explore our new interactive tool to create your own scenarios:
Image credit for social media/web: Gerardo Pesantez / World Bank and Dana Smillie / World Bank
Blogs
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What World Do We Want in 2050?Richer aging countries need educated young workers to provide the services and entrepreneurial talent to sustain their quality of ...
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The Perils of a Declining Labor ForceThe ongoing global demographic transition is massive in scale and likely impact. For most of the past 200 years, the vast majority...
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The Moral Imperative for Climate FinanceThere is some good news on global climate change. The International Energy Agency suggests we are “at the beginning of the end” of... -
Development and Extractive Industries in a Net Zero WorldFor all of the well-advertised risks of overdependence on subsoil assets, they are an important source of government revenues and ... -
Forecasting Aid: Demand, Supply, Quality, and InstitutionsInternational finance is under considerable pressure: originally prioritized toward economic growth in poorer countries, it is now... -
The Future of Development: Business and Consumer ServicesOur new paper forecasts global structural transformation over the next thirty years. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise that it...
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Old and New Forecasts for Shares of the Global Economy in 2050.In our recent paper forecasting global economic outcomes in 2050, we compared our estimates to the five shared socioeconomic pathw... -
Economic Growth is Necessary to Reduce Global PovertyI’m very grateful to Olivier de Schutter, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, for his discussion of Zack G... -
The US and the World in 2050In a new paper, Zack Gehan and I present scenarios for the global economy in 2050. These scenarios build on a forecast of economi... -
How Much Progress Against Poverty by 2050?The Sustainable Development Goals commit the world to ending extreme poverty by 2030. More cautiously, the World Bank’s twin goals...
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Forecasting Global Growth to 2050Forecasts of the future shape of the global economy, if they are at least somewhat accurate, can help planning and policy discussi...
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Is The Rate of Global Progress at a Peak?For all of the horrors that have punctuated the last two hundred years of human history, we have seen some awesomely unprecedented... -
Africa Needs More Jobs While Europe Needs More WorkersWe look at the challenges that Europe faces with an aging population, and ask if the challenges that Africa faces with a burg...
Publications
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The Implications of a Declining Labor ForceThis paper explores the potential implications of a declining absolute labor force on economic outcomes. It explores key macroecon... -
Socioeconomic Impact of Climate Change in Developing CountriesThis paper provides a discussion of future trends as established in the literature on the interaction between socioeconomic indica... -
The Future of Natural Resources and Development in Low and Middle-Income Countries?A global economy moving towards low-carbon production is going to dramatically shift demand for subsoil resources, from fossil fue... -
The Future of Official Aid FlowsThere is a non-trivial chance that ODA for non-humanitarian and climate finance will fall in absolute terms over the coming years ... -
Is Manufacturing Destiny? On the Dynamics of Future Sectoral Shares and DevelopmentIndicative projections of the evolution and peak of manufacturing in lower-income countries to 2050 suggest that cross-country inc...
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Scenarios for Future Global Growth to 2050We develop scenarios for the shape of the global economy in 2050 building on a simple regression of the historic relationship betw... -
The Ultimate Resource is PeakingGlobally, we are making fewer potential innovators. To extend our two-century era of comparatively rapid progress, we need radical... -
Climate Change May Have Only Small Effects on Long-Run Global GDP. So What?Climate change is a worldwide and potentially centuries-long event, but it is precipitating thousands of local and short-term cris... -
Confronting A World Workforce ImbalanceBased on UN projections from the period 2015 to 2050, Rebekah Smith and Farah Hani have calculated that prime working-age populati... -
Can Africa Help Europe Avoid Its Looming Aging Crisis?There will be 95 million fewer working-age people in Europe in 2050 than in 2015, under business as usual. The paper compares busi...
Events
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Two Futures for Global Development“Two Futures for Global Development” presents two scenarios—a reasonable best- and worst-case version of the world in 2050 based o... -
Future of Development ForumClimate change, conflict, food insecurity, and pandemics. These global challenges are growing in urgency, and complexity—and they ...
Contact
For more information, contact [email protected]
Contact
For more information, contact [email protected]
Experts
Charles Kenny
Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. His current work focuses on global economic prospects, gender and development, and development finance. He is...
Experts
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Charles KennyCharles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. His current work focuses on global economic prospects, gender and development, and development finance. He is...
Acknowledgments
How We're Funded
Find out more on the Center for Global Development's funding page.
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