Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma has an interesting op-ed
in today’s WSJ. Sharma observes:
“For much of the
post-World War II era the world’s population grew at an average annual rate of
almost 2%. But growth started to plummet in 1990 and is now running at about
1%—the lowest level in the postwar era—according to U.N. data.
This collapse is
seriously undermining potential economic growth—roughly calculated as the rate
of growth in the working-age population added to the rate of growth in
productivity, or output per worker—and goes a long way toward explaining the sluggish
recovery from the crisis of 2008.”