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December 8 - December 31, 2020
After surging for more than three decades, flows of capital reached a historic peak of $9 trillion and a 16 percent share of the global economy in 2007, then declined to $1.2 trillion or 2 percent of the global economy—the same share they represented in 1980.
Global trade % of global economy
The International Monetary Fund therefore defines a global recession not in terms of negative GDP growth but in terms of falling income growth, job losses, and other factors
Global recession definition IMF
when prices for copper and steel started to fall. It collapsed completely in late 2014, when the price of oil dropped by more than half in a span of months.
Price drop for steel prices in 2014 followed by oil
Among the ten largest developed economies, the number of working-age people is expected to remain static in France, shrink a little in Spain, and contract at a rapid pace of 0.4 percent a year or more in Italy, Germany, and Japan.
2015-20 population growth view in top 10 developed countries
In Mexico, the official retirement age is 65, but the typical Mexican man retires at 72. In France, the official retirement age is also 65, but the typical Frenchman actually retires before 60.
Retirement age FR & MX
world’s industrial robot population—about 1.6 million—and the global industrial labor force of about 320 million humans.
Industrial labor stats human and robot
According to the International Federation of Robots, the highest density of robots in the world can be found in South Korea, which in 2013 had 437 industrial robots per 10,000 employees, followed by Japan with 323, and Germany with 282. China was way behind with only 14,
Robot population
No member of this leadership generation did more to reform the basic structure of his nation’s economy, which is one reason South Korea remains economically stronger than Russia, Turkey, or Brazil today.
South Korean economy reform by Kim
as a share of GDP, construction had fallen from more than 30 percent in 2008 to 20 percent.
Dubai has in fact prospered more than its oil-rich neighbors by turning itself into their regional headquarters for shipping as well as travel, information technology, and financial services.
Over the decades Dubai has become home to the largest Iranian expat community outside the United States, with 450,000 residents and branches of ten thousand Iranian businesses, all linked to Iran by two hundred flights a week.
In Brazil, trade has been stuck for decades at around 20 percent of GDP, the lowest level of any country outside deliberately isolated outliers like North Korea.
China and India, and smaller even than populous commodity economies like Russia and Indonesia, all of which have a trade share of GDP that is close to or above 40 percent.
flows of goods amount to about $18 trillion a year, significantly greater than flows of both services and capital, which account for about $4 trillion each.
Vietnam has surpassed its much richer and more developed neighbors like Thailand and Malaysia as Southeast Asia’s leading exporter to the United States.
cheap currency, reasonably inexpensive labor, and a rapidly improving transportation network.
The European Union began with six members; it now counts twenty-eight. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations began with five members; it now has ten.
Around 70 percent of exports from European countries go to neighbors on the same continent, and in East Asia and North America, the figure is 50 percent. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in Latin America, the figure is 20 percent, in Africa it is 12 percent, and in South Asia just 5 percent.
Meanwhile trade between the Southeast Asian economies and China has exploded, rising by an average of 20 percent a year for the last twenty years.
It takes on average nineteen days to ship goods in from Singapore, 4,500 miles away, but twenty days to truck the same goods 300 miles down the road from the port at Mombasa to the capital in Nairobi. And Kenya has a $60 billion economy; in the many African nations where GDP is under $10 billion, outsiders often see even less reason to bother trying to surmount these obstacles.
Bangladesh is attracting much more textile production than India because it offers fewer bureaucratic hurdles.
Building roads in the steep Colombian mountains can cost $30 million per kilometer, roughly twenty five times more than in rural areas of the United States, which is why 90 percent of the country’s roads are unpaved.
which is why the ideal level of investment is capped at roughly 35 percent of GDP.
