The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

by Charles Goodhart

Besides the peasants and working classes in China, and neighbouring Asian countries, S. Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, etc., the other main winners over the last three decades have been those with good technical skills and qualifications, the managerial class and those with wealth for capital investment. As we showed earlier in Chapters 2 and 3, the combination of globalisation (essentially the China effect) plus the highly favourable trends in demography led to an unprecedented surge in the effective labour supply during these recent decades, more than doubling in the space of some 30 years. In that context those with the ability to provide that hugely expanded labour supply with the relevant managerial oversight, skills and equipment were bound to prosper.