I found that during these booms the average growth rate of the working-age population was 2.7 percent. In other words, a significant part of the growth in these miracle economies could be explained by the fact that more and more young people were reaching working age. This clear connection between a population explosion and an economic miracle has played out in dozens of cases, from Brazil in the 1960s and ’70s to Malaysia from the 1960s through the 1990s.
