Showing posts with label Demographics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Demographics. Show all posts

Monday, February 3, 2020

3/2/2020: Demographics and Support for the EU: Populism Base


Rising populism in politics, demographics and the financial crisis aftershocks are linked. Intuitively and empirically. And thus says a new study, published in the Journal of European Public Policy. The study by Fabian Lauterbach and Catherine e. De Vries, titled "Europe belongs to the young? Generational differences in public opinion towards the European Union during the Eurozone crisis" tackles the "...notion that younger people hold more favourable attitudes towards the European Union (EU) is prevalent in both academic and popular discourse." The authors shows that "Younger cohorts in debtor countries have become significantly more sceptical of the EU than their peers in creditor states" after the crisis. At the same time, "Older generations are more supportive of the EU in debtor countries compared to creditor states."

Marginal means by cohort, Euro-debtor, Euro-creditor and other EU member states


Full paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501763.2019.1701533

Saturday, July 6, 2019

6/7/19: American Pride: Another Divide


A great nation, divided and wanting for change as it may be... But just how divided are Americans? Bloomberg chart on a recent Gallup Poll data is quite telling:

The first thing to note is the demographic divide by age. Less than 50 percent of 18-29 year olds in the survey are 'extremely' or 'very' proud of being American. Less than 2/3rds of those of age 30-49 do as well. For older generations, the same number is 80 percent and higher.

The second is the partisan divide by party affiliation: only 50 percent of those identifying with the Democratic Party are 'extremely' or 'very' proud, against ca 95 percent of the Republicans. The Independents clock in under 65 percent.

Overall, Liberals, Democrats and the young are the flash points of relative disenchantment with the American identity, although the proportions of those who do not identify themselves as proud whatsoever and those identifying as proud 'only a little' is below 1/3rd for all three categories.

The numbers suggest less of a disillusionment problem than the weakening of the sentiment. Which does offer a glimpse of hope: repairing American's perceptions of their identity is not an insurmountable task. The good news, American people do appear to be longing for change and hope. The tougher-to-deal-with news is that we seem to lack leadership candidates to take us there...

Sunday, March 25, 2018

24/3/18: Dysfunctional Labour Markets? Ireland’s Activity Rates 2007-2016


Having posted previously on the continued problem of low labour force participation rates in Ireland, here is another piece of supporting evidence that the recovery in unemployment figures has been masking some pretty disturbing underlying trends. The following chart shows labour force Activity Rates reported by Eurostat:


Note: per Eurostat: "According to the definitions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) the activity rate is the percentage of economically active population aged 15-64 on the total population of the same age group."

Ireland’s showing is pretty poor across the board. At the end of 2016, Irish labour force activity rate stood at 69.3%, or 16th lowest in the EU. For Nordic countries, members of the EU, the rate stood at 71.2, while for Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, the average rate was 78.2.

Over time, compared to 2007-2008 average, Irish activity rate was still down 1.6 percentage points in 2016. In the Euro area, the movement was up 2 percentage points. Of all EU countries, only two: Cyprus and Finland, posted decreases in 2016 activity rates compared to 2007-2008 average.

For an economy with no pressing ageing concerns, Ireland has a labour market that appears to be dysfunctionally out of touch with realities of the modern economy. In part, this reflects a positive fact: Ireland sports high rates of younger adults in-education, helped by our healthy demographics. However, given the structure of Irish migration (especially net immigration of the younger skilled workers into Ireland) and given sky-high rates of disability claims in Ireland, the low activity rate also reflects low level of labour force participation. In this context, younger demographic make up of the country stands in stark contradiction to this factor.

According to Census 2016, "There was a total of 643,131 people with a disability in April 2016 accounting for 13.5 per cent of the population; this represented an increase of 47,796 persons on the 2011 figure of 595,335 when it accounted for 13.0 per cent of the population." (Source: http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/newsevents/documents/census2016summaryresultspart2/Census_2016_Summary_Results_%E2%80%93_Part_2.pdf) However, "Of the total 643,131 persons with a disability 130,067 were at work, accounting for 6.5 per cent of the workforce. Among those aged 25-34, almost half (47.8%) were at work whereas by age 55 to 64 only 25 per cent of those with a disability were at work." Another potential driver of low economic activity rate in Ireland is the structure of long term care within the healthcare (or rather effective non-existent structure of such care), pushing large number of the Irish people of working age into provision of care for the long-term ill relatives.

Here is the OECD data (for 2016) on labour force participation rates:

Source: https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.htm.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

22/1/18: Interest Rates, Demographics and Secular Stagnation: Euro Area 2018-2025


An interesting recent paper from ECB on the link between monetary policy (interest rates) and secular stagnation. Ferrero, Giuseppe and Gross, Marco and Neri, Stefano, ECB Working Paper, titled "On Secular Stagnation and Low Interest Rates: Demography Matters" (July 26, 2017, ECB WP No. 2088: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3009653) argues that adverse demographic developments can account for a long-run (since the mid-1980s) trend decline in real and nominal interest rates. In particular,  demographic factors linked to secular stagnation, have "exerted downward pressures on real short- and long-term interest rates in the euro area over the past decade."


Using EU Commission projected dependency ratios to 2025, the authors "illustrate that the foreseen structural change in terms of age structure of the population may dampen economic growth and continue exerting downward pressure on real interest rates also in the future".

Specifically, "the counterfactual projections suggest an economically and statistically relevant role for
demography. Interest rates would have been higher and economic activity growth measures stronger under the assumed more favorable historical demographic assumptions. Concerning the forward-looking assessment, interest rates would remain at relatively low levels under the assumption that demography develops as projected by the EC, and would rise visibly only under the assumed more favorable forward paths for dependency ratios."

Here are the dependency ration projections (red dots = EU Commission report projections; purple dots = 2015 outrun remains stable over 2016-2025 horizon, green line = mid-point between EU Commission forecast and static 2015 scenario):

And now, translating the above dependency ratios into macroeconomic performance:
Notice the following: under both, the adverse (European Commission estimates) and the moderate (central - green) scenarios, we have real GDP growth materially below 1 percent by 2025 and on average, below historical average levels for pre-crisis period. This is secular stagnation. In fact, even under the benign scenario of no demographic change from 2015, growth rate is unimpressive. Potential output panel confirms this.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

20/7/17: U.S. Institutions: the Less Liberal, the More Trusted


In my recent working paper (see http://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2017/06/27617-millennials-support-for-liberal.html) I presented some evidence of a glacial demographically-aligned shift in the Western (and U.S.) public views of liberal democratic values. Now, another small brick of evidence to add to the roster:
The latest public opinion poll in the U.S. suggests that out of four 'net positively-viewed' institutions of the society, American's prefer coercive and non-democratic (in terms of internal governance - hierarchical and command-based) institutions most: the U.S. Military and the FBI. as well as the U.S. Federal Reserve. Note: the four are U.S. military, the FBI and the Supreme Court and the Fed are all institutions that are not open to influence from external debates and are driven by command-enforcement systems of decision making and/or implementation. Whilst they serve democratic system of the U.S. institutions, they are  subject to severely restricted extent of liberal checks and balances.

Beyond this, considering net-disfavoured institutions, executive powers (less liberty-based) of the White House are less intensively disliked compared to more liberty-based Congress.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

27/6/17: Millennials’ Support for Liberal Democracy is Failing


New paper is now available at SSRN: "Millennials’ Support for Liberal Democracy is Failing. An Investor Perspective" (June 27, 2017): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993535.


Recent evidence shows a worrying trend of declining popular support for the traditional liberal democracy across a range of Western societies. This decline is more pronounced for the younger cohorts of voters. The prevalent theories in political science link this phenomena to a rise in volatility of political and electoral outcomes either induced by the challenges from outside (e.g. Russia and China) or as the result of the aftermath of the recent crises. These views miss a major point: the key drivers for the younger generations’ skepticism toward the liberal democratic values are domestic intergenerational political and socio-economic imbalances that engender the environment of deep (Knightian-like) uncertainty. This distinction – between volatility/risk framework and the deep uncertainty is non-trivial for two reasons: (1) policy and institutional responses to volatility/risk are inconsistent with those necessary to address rising deep uncertainty and may even exacerbate the negative fallout from the ongoing pressures on liberal democratic institutions; and (2) investors cannot rely on traditional risk management approaches to mitigate the effects of deep uncertainty. The risk/volatility framework view of the current political trends can result in amplification of the potential systemic shocks to the markets and to investors through both of these factors simultaneously. Despite touching on a much broader set of issues, this note concludes with a focus on investment strategy that can mitigate the rise of deep political uncertainty for investors.


Wednesday, July 20, 2016

20/7/16: McKinsey's "Generation Worse"...


A new study from McKinsey looks at the cross-generational distribution of income as a form of new ‘inequality’, in words of the authors: “an aspect of inequality that has received relatively little attention, perhaps because prior to the 2008 financial crisis less than 2 percent of households in advanced economies were worse off than similar households in previous years. That has now changed: two-thirds of households in the United States and Western Europe were in segments of the income distribution whose real market incomes in 2014 were flat or had fallen compared with 2005.”

In other words, McKinsey folks are looking at the “proportion of households in advanced economies with flat or falling incomes” - the generational cohorts that are no better than their predecessors.

Key findings are frightening: “Between 65 and 70 percent of households in 25 advanced economies, the equivalent of 540 million to 580 million people, were in segments of the income distribution whose real market incomes—their wages and income from capital—were flat or had fallen in 2014 compared with 2005. This compared with less than 2 percent, or fewer than ten million people, who experienced this phenomenon between 1993 and 2005.”

So that promise of the ‘sharing economy’ and the ‘gig-economy’ where people today are enabled to derive income (and thus wealth) from hereto under-utilised ‘assets’… pwah! not doing much. The ‘most empowered’ - web and gig-economy wise cohorts? Ah, they are actually the “worst-hit” ones. “Today’s younger generation is at risk of ending up poorer than their parents. Most population segments experienced flat or falling incomes in the 2002–12 decade but young, less-educated workers were hardest hit”.

For those of us who, like myself, tend to be libertarian in our view of the Government, McKinsey study tests some of our accepted ‘wisdoms’: “Government policy and labor-market practices helped determine the extent of flat or falling incomes. In Sweden, for example, where the government intervened to preserve jobs, market incomes fell or were flat for only 20 percent, while disposable income advanced for almost everyone. In the United States, government taxes and transfers turned a decline in market incomes for 81 percent of income segments into an increase in disposable income for nearly all households.”

Except, may be it did not, because counting in disposable income while allowing for taxes and subsidies is notoriously difficult and imprecise. And may be, just may be, all the fiscal imbalances that were accumulated in the process of achieving these supports in some (many) countries will still have to be paid by someone some day?

There is a reduced connection between current growth metrics and income outcomes on the ground (don’t we know as much here in Ireland, with 26.3% jump in GDP in 2015?): “Before the recession, GDP growth contributed about 18 percentage points to median household income growth, on average, in the United States and Europe. In the seven years after the recession, that contribution fell to four percentage points, and even these gains were eroded by labor market and demographic shifts.”

And the forward outlook? Bleak: “Longer-run demographic and labor trends will continue to weigh on income advancement. Even if economies resume their historical high-growth trajectory, we project that 30 to 40 percent of income segments may not experience market income gains in the next decade if labor-market shifts such as workplace automation accelerate. If the slow growth conditions of 2005–12 persist, as much as 70 to 80 percent of income segments in advanced economies may experience flat or falling market incomes to 2025.”


There are some wrinkles in the study. For example, in the U.S. case - cross time comparatives do not provide for the same data base, as pre-2014 data does not include state and local taxes. VAT and sales taxes are omitted across the board. And some other, but overall, the paper is pretty solid and very interesting.

So here is the key summary chart, positing the massive jump in the numbers of households on the declining side of market incomes:



And the chart showing that the taxes and transfers side of income supports is no longer sustainable over time:


Which brings us to the main problem: on the current trend line, politics of income supports from the fiscal policy side are unlikely to be able to contain growth in political discontent. Advanced economies are heading for serious tests of democratic institutions in years to come. Buckle your seat belts: the ride is going to get much rougher.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

13/7/16: Xenophobic Britain, Good Europe Mythology


You know the shrill of the deeply wounded 'Remain' supporters from the UK Referendum that did not go their way? Ah, yes: "Older Britain, that won, is xenophobic, racist, anti-migrant. And the young Britain, that lost, is the opposite of that."

Ok, there are stereotypes. And then there are stereotypes. The 'old Britain' that is allegedly such a terrible place is the one that built one of the most multicultural societies in the world. That's right: the young Britain was not even born when that happened.

But never mind history, here's the most current (1Q 2016) data on attitudes to multiculturalism from the not-so-pro-Brexit source, PewResearch:

By opposition to multi-ethnic society, the UK ranks 5th in the group of these countries, tied with on-so-progressively-liberal Germany, and better than core-European-values Italy and Holland, ahead of the beacon of European democracy Poland. By actual support for multi-ethnicity in society, the UK ranks third, ahead of all other European countries in the survey other than Sweden.

Of course, the U.S. leads all the countries in terms of support for multi-ethnic society. Not surprisingly.

Here's another interesting snapshot from the same study:

So if we are to look at the Left-Right gap, the UK is at the widest differential in opinions on diversity in Europe. But, and here is a major but, with 27% of Conservatives (Right) supporting diversity, it has the most 'liberal' Right in Europe after Sweden. Oh, and notice the little blow up for the 'xenophobic Republicans in the U.S.' meme - that too is absolute bullshit, since U.S. conservatives are more supportive of ethnic diversity liberal / Left Europeans except those in Sweden and the UK.


You can glimpse few more insights into the Pew survey here: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/12/in-views-of-diversity-many-europeans-are-less-positive-than-americans/.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

4/5/16: Talent Is a Problem, But so Is Financial Services Model


When it comes to talent, hedge funds tend to hoover highly skilled and human capital-rich candidates like no other sub-sector. Which means that if we are to gauge the flow of talent into the general workforce, it is at the Wall Street, not the Main Street, where we should be taking measure of the top incoming labour pool. And here, Roger, we have, allegedly, a problem.

Take Steven Cohen, a billionaire investor hedge fund manager of Point72 (USD11 billion AUM). The lad is pretty good thermometer for ‘hotness’ of the talent pool because: (a) he employs a load of talented employees in high career impact jobs; (b) he tends to train in-house staff; (3) he operates in highly competitive industry, where a margin of few bad employees can make a big difference; and (4) courtesy of the U.S. regulators, he ONLY has his own skin in the game.

Cohen was speaking this Monday at the Milken Institute Global Conference about how he is "blown away by the lack of talent" of qualified incoming staff, saying that it is ”not easy to find great people. We whittle down the funnel to maybe 2 to 4 percent of the candidates we're interested in… Talent is really thin."

His fund hires only approximately 1/5th of its analysts and fund managers externally, with the balance 4/5ths coming from internal training and promotion channels.

The sentiment Cohen expressed is not new. International Banker recently featured an article by a seasoned Financial Services recruiter, who noted that “…many firms are finding it hard to attract the right candidates—and also failing to comprehend the true cost of finding the “right hire”” (see here: http://internationalbanker.com/finance/financial-services-need-put-culture-centre-organisations/).

Some interesting insights into shifting candidates preferences and attitudes and the mismatch these create between the structure and culture of Financial Services employment can be gleaned from this article: http://chapmancg.com/news/thought-leadership/2015/08/three-way-mirror-global-talent-challenges-in-financial-services. In particular, notable shifts in candidates’ culture with gen-Y entering the workforce are clearly putting pressure on Financial Services business model.

2015 study by Deloitte (see here: http://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/financial-services/articles/gx-talent-in-insurance.html) summed up changes in Generational preferences for jobs in a neat graph:


And the business graduates’ career goals? Why, they are less pinstripes and more hipster:



In simple terms, it is quite unsurprising that Cohen is finding it difficult to attract talent. While supply of graduates might be no smaller in size, it is of different quality in expectations (and thus aptitude). Graduates’ expectations and values have shifted in the direction where majority are simply no longer willing to spend 5 years as junior analysts working 20 hour days 7 days a week in a sector that does pay well, but also faces huge uncertainties in terms of forward career prospects (to see this, read: http://linkis.com/constantcontact.com/9JrQd).

Which means, High Finance is in trouble: its business model does not quite allow for accommodating changing demographic trends in career development preferences. Until, that is, the tech bubble blows, leaving scores of talented but heavily hipsterized graduates no other option but to bite the bullet and settle into one of those 5-years long bootcamps.



NB: Incidentally, recently I was a witness to a bizarre conversation between a graduate and a senior professor. A graduate - heading by her own admission into a Government sector job in international policy insisted that the job requires her to be entrepreneurial, 'almost running [her] own business’. The faculty member supported her assertion and assured that she teaches students how to run their own businesses in courses she provides on... international diplomacy and policy. Not surprisingly, neither one of the two ever ran a business.

The hipster haven ideals of ‘we are all so creative, we can run a business from our college dorms’ run deep. And they are not about the blood and sweat of actually running a business, nor the risk of going into the world penniless and earning nothing for years on end while the business is growing. Instead, entrepreneurship for the young is all about perceived fun of doing so.

There will be tears upon collision with reality.

Monday, April 18, 2016

18/4/16: Demographics, Ageing & Inflation


In my Investment Theory & ESG Risk course, a week ago, we were looking at Asset Price Models extensions to incorporate inflation risks. One discussion we had was about the possible correlation between inflation and investor behaviour / choices, linked to behavioural anomalies.

A recent Bank of Finland working paper by Mikael Juselius and Elod Takats, titled “The Age-Structure – Inflation Puzzle” (2016, Bank of Finland Research Discussion Paper No. 4/2016: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2759780) sheds some light on this link via demographic side of investor / economic agent impact on inflationary expectations.

Specifically, the authors uncovered “a puzzling link between low-frequency inflation and the population age-structure”.

This link is pretty simple: due to asymmetric relationship between consumption, savings and investment across the life cycle, “the young and old (dependents) are inflationary whereas the working age population is disinflationary”.

In other words, risks of higher inflation are demographically tilted against markets / economies with either high young age dependencies, old age dependencies or both.

According to authors, “the relationship is not spurious and holds for different specifications and controls in data from 22 advanced economies from 1955 to 2014.”

And effects are large: “The age-structure effect is economically sizable, accounting e.g. for about 6.5 percentage points of U.S. disinflation from 1975 to today’s low inflation environment. It also accounts for much of inflation persistence, which challenges traditional narratives of trend inflation.”


Crucially, “the age-structure effect is forecastable” in so far as we can see pretty accurately long term demographic trends, “and will increase inflationary pressures over the coming decades”. In other words, deflationary environment today is expected to become inflationary environment tomorrow:


Hence, the rising demand for real assets and structural support for new levels of gold prices.

It’s all in the long run game.

Monday, January 18, 2016

18/1/16: Forget Conventional Geopolitics, Demographics is the New Global Conflict Ground Zero


While analysts are worried about geopolitical tensions relating to *hot*, *cold* and *frozen* conflicts of traditional nature, the real Global Conflict is unfolding, slowly-paced, in the realm of demographics.

Here are two key themes underlying it:

Firstly, the ongoing widening of the generational gap, highlighted in my recent talks including here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2015/07/29715-retailgoogle-key-trends-on.html. The Generational gap that can be described as the difference between economic power and aspirations of two distinct generations: the post-millenials and baby-boomers.

To see this we can take two examples of views from the baby-boom generation:



The second manifestation is that of the disappearing middle classes, best highlighted by the following series of links covering Pew Research analysis of the U.S. data:


All of the above concluding with the twin trend of vanishing core generational driver for the global economy: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/

If you still think conventional weapons and geopolitical power plays are the biggest disruptors of status quo ante, think again.


Thursday, January 14, 2016

14/1/16: Push or Pull: Entrepreneurship Among Older Households


Recently, I highlighted some of the potential problems relating to the less stable nature of the Gig Economy employment, including the longer-term pressures on life-cycle savings and pensions, as well as health care provision (you can see my discussion here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2015/12/71215-cx-future-of-work-summit-dublin.html and my slides here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2015/11/111115-gig-economy-challenge.html.

Mainstream economics has been lagging behind this trend, with little research on the long-term sustainability of the Gig Economy employment. Thus, it is quite heartening to see some related, albeit tangentially, research coming up.

One example is a very interesting study on entrepreneurship amongst the U.S. older households. Weller, Christian E. and Wenger, Jeffrey B. and Lichtenstein, Benyamin and Arcand, Carolyn, paper titled "Push or Pull: What Explains Growing Entrepreneurship Among Older Households?" (November 30, 2015: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2697091) does what it says: it looks at both push and pull factors for entrepreneurship and self-employment amongst older households.

Per authors (italics are mine): "Older households need to save more money for retirement, possibly by working longer. [Which is a pull factor for self-employment and  entrepreneurship]. But, the same labor market pressures that have made it harder for people to save, such as increasingly unstable labor markets, have also made it more difficult for people to work longer as wage and salary employees. [Which is a push factor toward self-employment and entrepreneurship].

Self-employment hence may have become an increasingly attractive alternative option for older households.

Entrepreneurship among older households has indeed grown faster than wage and salary employment, especially since the late 1990s.

But, this growth, rather than reflecting rising economic pressures, may have been the result of growing financial strengths – fewer financial constraints and more access to income diversification through capital income from rising wealth. Our empirical analysis finds little support for the hypothesis that growing economic pressures have contributed to increasing entrepreneurship. Instead, our results suggest that the growth of older entrepreneurship is coincident with increasing access to income diversification, especially from dividend and interest income. We also find some tentative evidence that access to Social Security and other annuity benefits increasingly correlate with self-employment. Greater access to interest and dividend income follows in part from more wealth and improved access to Social Security may reflect relatively strong labor market experience in the past."

This is an interesting result, because it is based on older households' access to:

  1. Income from savings and wealth, including assets wealth; and
  2. Income from retirement.
In the Gig Economy, both are likely to be compressed due to higher income volatility (and thus rising precautionary savings), tax incidences that impose liability with a lag (inducing higher income uncertainty), and lower earnings (due to lack of paid vacations, maternity/paternity and sick leave). In some cases, e.g. countries like Ireland, there is also an explicit income tax penalty for the self-employed (via both lower standard deductions and higher tax rates, such as those under the USC). All of which implies reduced access to income from retirement in the future, lower savings and wealth (including through inheritance). 

Subsequently, the current cohort of older entrepreneurs and self-employed may exhibit exactly the opposite drivers for their post-retirement employment choices than today's younger cohorts. And that matters because entrepreneurship and self-employment that start with push factors (e.g. necessity of life and constraints of the labour markets) is less successful than entrepreneurship and self-employment that start with pull factors.


Tuesday, July 7, 2015

7/6/15: Secular Stagnation: A Double-Threat


Recent evidence on long term growth dynamics and drivers decomposition across the advanced economies presents a striking paradox relating to the post-recessionary experience around the world. In a traditional business cycle, recovery period growth exhibits certain historical regularities, that are no longer present in the current cycle. These regularities involve the following stylised facts:
1) Following a recessionary contraction in aggregate output, advanced economies enter a stage of recovery associated with strong growth in investment and domestic demand;
2) Gains in factors' productivity, especially in labour productivity, are amplified in the early stages of post-recessionary recovery compared to their pre-crisis trend levels; and
3) Rates of growth in the recovery cycle are in excess of pre-recessionary growth.

These facts are patently absent from the data for the major advanced economies today, some four to five years into the recovery. This realization has prompted some economic and financial analysts to speculate about the potential structural decline in long term growth rates, the thesis commonly termed "secular stagnation".

Currently, there are two prevailing theses of secular stagnation, linked to two long-term cycles gaining prominence in the global economy: the demand side and the supply side theses.


Investment-Savings Mismatch

The first theory suggests that secular stagnation is linked to a structural decline in aggregate demand, manifesting itself though a decades-long mismatch between aggregate savings and investment and more broadly related to the demographic effects of ageing.

This theory traces back to the 1930s suggestion by Alvin Hansen that the U.S. Great Depression aftermath was coinciding with decreasing birth rates, resulting in oversupply of savings and a fall off in demand for investment. The thesis was salient throughout the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, but was overrun by the war and subsequently forgotten in the years of the post-WW2 baby boom and investment uplift. Large scale increase in public investment, linked to rebuilding destroyed (in Europe and Japan) or neglected (in the war years in the U.S.) public infrastructure, helped to push Hansen's forecasts of a structural growth slowdown aside.

The thesis of demand-driven secular stagnation made its first return to the forefront of macroeconomic thinking back in the 1990s, in the context of Japan. As in Hansen's 1930s U.S., by the early 1990s, Japan was suffering from a demographics-linked glut of savings, and a structural drop off in investment. Suppressed domestic demand has led to a massive contraction in labour productivity. During the 1980-1989 period, Japan's real GDP per worker averaged 3.2 percent per annum. In the following decade, the rate of growth was just over 0.82 percent and over the period of 2000-2009 it fell below 0.81 percent. Meanwhile, Japan's investment as a percentage of GDP fell from approximately 29-30 percent in the 1980s and the 1990s to under 23 percent in the 2000s and to just over 20 percent in 2010-2015.

Following Japan's experience and the shock of the Great Recession, the theory that the entire developed world is set for a structural growth slowdown has gained traction. Between 1980 and 2014, the gap between savings and investment as percentage of GDP has widened in Canada, Japan, and the Euro area. Controlling for debt accumulation in the real economy, the widening of savings surplus over investment over each decade since the 1980s is now present in all major advanced economies, including the U.S.

In line with this, labour productivity also fell precipitously across all major advanced economies. As shown in the chart below, even a period of unprecedented rise in unemployment in the U.S. and the euro area over the recent Great Recession did not shift the trend for declining labour productivity growth.

CHART: Five-year Cumulated Growth in Real GDP per Employee
Percentage Points

Source: Author own calculations based on data from the IMF


Worse, current zero rates monetary policy environment is reinforcing the savings-investment mismatch, rendering the monetary policy impotent, if not damaging, in stimulating the return to higher long term growth.

Traditionally, low interest rates create incentives for investment and reduced saving by lowering the cost of the former and increasing the opportunity cost of the latter.

However, today's ageing demographics and rising dependency ratios offset these 'normal' effects. This means that for the older generations, retirement pressures work through both insufficient reserves built in pensions portfolios, and also through lower yields on retirement portfolios, incentivising more aggressive savings.

For the working age population, the pressures are more complex. On the one hand, middle age workers today face severe pressures to deleverage their balance sheets, aggressively reducing liabilities accumulated before the crisis. On the other hand, growing proportions of middle-age adults are facing twin financial pressures from the rising demand for support for ageing parents and, simultaneously, for increasing number of satay-at-home younger adults who continue to rely on family networks for financial and housing subsidies. A recent Pew Research study found that 64 percent of Italian middle-aged generations find themselves sandwiched between ageing parents and children. In the U.S. this proportion is 47 percent and in Germany 41 percent. All along, the same households are under pressure to build up their pensions, as retirement security and social provision of pensions are now highly uncertain.

In his speech to the NABE Policy Conference in February 2014, Lawrence H. Summers (http://larrysummers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/NABEspeech-
Lawrence-H.-Summers1.pdf) outlined six  core sources of this demand side-driven slowdown:
1) Existent legacy of the private debt overhang;
2) Demographics of ageing;
3) Rising income inequality that induces greater financial insecurity today and into the future, thus creating incentives for increased ordinary and precautionary savings;
4) Access to low cost capital;
5) Positive real interest rates that continue to prevail despite historically low policy rates; and
6) Large scale holdings of banks' reserves on central banks balance sheets.

All of these factors are currently at play in the U.S., UK and the euro area, as well as Japan. With a lag of about 3-5 years, they are also starting to manifest themselves in other advanced economies.


Tech Investment: Value-Added  Miss

The supply side of secular stagnation thesis is a relatively new idea coming from the cyclical view of historical development of physical and ICT-linked technologies. First formulated by Robert Gordon some years ago it is summarised in his August 2012 NBER paper, titled "Is the US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds" (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2133145).

Gordon looks at long-term - very long-term - trends in growth from the point of challenging the traditional view of macroeconomists that perpetual economic progress is subject to no time constraints. In Gordon's view, U.S. economy over the period through the 2050s is likely to face an uphill battle. Per Gordon, "The frontier established by the U.S. for output per capita, and the U. K. before it, gradually began to grow more rapidly after 1750, reached its fastest growth rate in the middle of the 20th century, and has slowed down since.  It is in the process of slowing down further."

The reason for this, according to the author, is the exhaustion of economic returns to the most recent technological / industrial 'revolution'.  "A useful organizing principle to understand the pace of growth since 1750 is the sequence of three industrial revolutions. The first with its main inventions between 1750 and 1830 created steam engines, cotton spinning, and railroads. The second was the most important, with its three central inventions of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and running water with indoor plumbing, in the relatively short interval of 1870 to 1900.  Both the first two revolutions required about 100 years for their full effects to percolate through the economy. …After 1970 productivity growth slowed markedly, most plausibly because the main ideas of [the second revolution] had by and large been implemented by then. The computer and Internet revolution began around 1960 and reached its climax in the dot.com era of the late 1990s, but its main impact on productivity has withered away in the past eight years. …Invention since 2000 has centered on entertainment and communication devices that are smaller, smarter, and more capable, but do not fundamentally change labor productivity or the standard of living in the way that electric light, motor cars, or indoor plumbing changed it."

Gordon’s argument is not about the levels of activity generated by the new technologies, but about the rate of growth in value added arising form them. In basic terms, ongoing slowdown in the U.S. (and global) economy is a function of six headwinds, including the end of the baby boom generation-linked demographic dividend; rising income and wealth inequality; factor price equalisation; lower net of cost returns to higher education; the impact of environmental regulations and taxes; and real economic debt overhangs across public and non-financial private sectors.

Gordon estimates that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution is likely to fall below 0.5 percent per annum over the period of some five decades.

The supply-side thesis, implying persistently falling returns to technological innovation and resulting reduced rates of productive investment in technological capital, is supported by some top thinkers in the tech sector, notably the U.S. entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel (see http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144feabdc0.html).

A recent study from IBM, titled "Insatiable Innovation: From sporadic to systemic", attempted to debate the thesis, but ended up confirming Gordon’s assertion that incremental and atomistic innovation is the driver for today's technological progress. In other words, the third technological revolution is delivering marginal returns on investment: significant and non-negligible from the point of individual enterprises, but hardly capable of sustaining rapid rates of growth in economic value added over time.

Disruptive Change Required

The problem is that both theses of secular stagnation are finding support not only in the past historical data, but also in the more recent trends. Even the most recent World Economic Outlook update by the IMF (April 2015) shows that the ongoing economic slowdown is structural in nature and traces back to the period prior to the onset of the Great Recession.

As both, the demand and supply side theses of secular stagnation allege, the core drivers identified by the IMF as the force behind this trend are adverse demographics, decline in investment, a pronounced fall off in total factor productivity growth (the tech factor), as well as the associated decline in labour and human capital contributions to productivity. IMF evidence strongly suggests that during the pre-crisis spike in global growth, much of new economic activity was driven not by expansion on intensive margin (technological progress and labour productivity expansion), but by extensive margin (increased supply of physical capital and emergence of asset bubbles).

Like it or not, to deliver the growth momentum necessary for sustaining the quality of life and improvements in social and economic environment expected by the ageing and currently productive generations will require some serious and radical solutions. The thrust of these changes will need to focus on attempting to reverse the decline in returns to human capital investment and on generating radically higher economic value added growth from technological innovation. The former implies dramatic restructuring of modern systems of taxation and public services provision to increase incentives for human capital investments. The latter implies an equally disruptive reform of the traditional institutions of entrepreneurship and enterprise formation and development.


Absent these highly disruptive policy reforms, we will find ourselves at the tail end of technological growth frontier, with low rates of return to technology and innovation and, as the result, permanently lower growth in the advanced economies.