Charles Goodhart

“While birth rates have been going down sharply in most of the advanced countries, this has not been so in much of the Indian subcontinent, and particularly not so in Africa. There will be a massive rise in the available working population in these parts of the world. Just as the production of goods was shifted from the West into China over the last three decades, could a similar shift lead to the production of goods moving to the Indian subcontinent and, particularly, to Africa, where the rate of growth of the working population in countries like Nigeria and the Congo will be quite remarkable over the next few decades?”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

“Juselius and Takats (2016) uncover an empirical relationship—‘a puzzling link between low-frequency inflation and population-age structure : the young and old (dependents) are inflationary whereas the working age population is disinflationary’. They use data from 22 countries between 1955 and 2014, breaking up that time period so they are not biased by periods of high or low inflation. Their analysis shows that 6.5% of the disinflation in the USA from 1975 to 2014 can be accounted for by age structure. The age structure, they argue, ‘is forecastable and will increase inflationary pressures over the coming decades’.”
― Charles Goodhart, The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival