Alex Mealor

Welcome to a new Demographics Watch! We will take a deep dive into public debt and how it’s related to birth rates and ageing population. If you want to go even deeper into our numbers, we have set up a Demographics page on our Datahub, where you can play around with the numbers yourself. It’s for Premium users only – but you can try it out for free with a 14-day trial.   Demographics Watch – A Public Debt Timebomb   In our first Demographics Watch article, we introduced ‘The Problem Index’ – a measure of a country’s ability to deal with an ageing population. Weighing the pull and push forces of growing dependency (an increasing older population relying on its diminishing working age population) and migration (as one potential way to fill this gap), we outlined the countries most vulnerable to a continuation, or worsening of current demographic trends. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t make for comfortable reading anywhere, but the index suggested two major problem regions – Eastern and Southern Europe, and East Asia.    We also highlighted that the Problem Index would serve as the groundwork on which we’d build. Today, we want to expand upon the pure demographic trends explored by considering the second order economic impacts captured by the Problem Index – namely, an ageing population’s impact on a country’s public debt.    Before we delve into the forecasts and data itself, a brief 101. The theory itself is relatively straightforward: ageing populations – people living longer […]