The problem with forecasts is that there can be any number of permutations that you want to consider.

For example:

• What will the impact be on total GDP and GDP per capita if female participation in the labour force increased by 5% or 10%?
• If immigration was stopped how would this affect the size of the labour force over the next 5 to 10 years?
• Should a country encourage more births? Would that ensure there are sufficient workers to support the ageing population?
• If the country can increase productivity of its labour force by 5% how would that impact the distribution of households by income?

Not only are there multiple questions to ask, but also for each there can be multiple scenarios - does the variable increase a little or a lot and over what time period?

Added to that there is the complexity of interconnections. For example a simple reduction in the birth rate will over the next 20 years

• lower total population size from what it would have been
• increase household income and expenditure per capita
• reduce the growth of the labour force
• and may (depending on trends in education and infra structure per worker) increase productivity per worker
• Which may actually result in faster GDP growth.

The Global Demographics population, income and expenditure model incorporates the inter relationships that exist in order to provide the forecasts that we do in our online database.

Now that same model is available to clients.

As explained on the subsequent pages in this section you can alter any one (or number) of what are the key determinant variables (e.g. birth rate) and instantly see the impact of that change on all other ‘dependent variables’ as well as the overall change in the nature, size and affluence of the population.

It is designed to be easy to use and can be applied to any of the 117 countries that we cover.

Please Note: The model is only available for countries and Provinces in China at this stage. We will examine extending it to key cities in China in subsequent developments.

Proceed to Model Overview