From a reply to a news feed…
"
The Federal Statistic’s Office on Wednesday forecast Germany’s
rapidly ageing population was likely to decline by 20 percent to around
65 million by 2060."
If it’s too long or too confusing for you, skip the crap to go to the highlighted lines…
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Calls for native germanic baby-making are too little too late …
birthrate-related demographic projections are the only element of
economic forecasting that have any real validity. A new German baby
born in 2010 would hit peak its peak earnings years in 2055-2065. Too
late!
Voluntary immigrants can be divided into two broad camps:
1) those who feel that another place would be a better place to make
their pile and 2) those who already have one who want to preserve the
one they’ve already made and feel they can do so more comfortably/tax
efficiently somewhere else.
1) can be further divided into a)
people whose home country is so bad sociopolitically (war, famine, no
rule of law, racial/social subtype discrimination) that they’ll hide in
a shipping container to get anywhere else, b ) people whose home
country is so overpopulated/already competitive that economic
opportunity is squelched, c) people whose home country’s labor laws
and/or tax regieme are so restrictive/regressive that they’re afraid
they’ll never be able to make their pile regardless of how hard they
work.
2) can be further divided into a) those whose home country
is just fine lifestlye and weather-wise but has a confiscatory tax
regieme, b ) those whose country has an okay lifestyle but with crappy
weather and a regressive tax regieme but who don’t care about
the weather, c) those whose home country has a crappy lifestyle, crappy
weather and a regressive tax regieme who want to move to fairer climes.
N.b.
I’ve deliberately left out those of us who are expatriates working for
international firms whose jobs are increasingly geographically
independent and/or living here for family reasons (from what I can see,
most of the Toytown demographic); I think this covers Dubai, Singapore
and Hong Kong as well.
A major mitigating factor is how
accepting the country to which one plans to emigrate is toward
immigrants … either because the culture is accepting from a
social/language perspective and if barriers to entry to setting up
typical immigrant businesses (restaurants, construction, piece work,
etc.) are low and/or whether there’s an extant expat community of one’s
fellow original countrymen already in place … clearly a bit more
important for 2 than for 1. This includes having an extant elite
private secondayr/university education system with international appeal
(US and UK).
The US, Canada and Australia tick the boxes for 1
and 2a,b&c. Spain attracts British and German retirees because the
weather’s nice and there are sufficient colonies of expats, so cover
2c. Switzerland, Luxembourg, Isle of Man, Channel Islands also attract
2a&b, whilst Carribean Islands, "sunny places for shady people"
like Monaco or Andorra or the US attract 2a&c. Germans moving to
Denmark or Finland (and until recently the UK) are clearly a
combination of 1c and 2b; same for the French in the UK (which is why
Sarkozy campaigned there). Indian/Pakistani and other Commonwealth
immigrants to the UK are generally 1b.
Unfortunately, Germany is perceived (sometimes unfairly) to have crappy lifestyle, crappy weather and
a confiscatory tax regieme, so sadly fails most of these decision
trees, and as a result attracts only 1a&b. The mitigating factors
are perceived to be not nearly as strong as they are elsewhere.
They
should turn East Germany into a special economic zone like Deng
Xiaoping did with Schenzhen, West Germany into Switzerland writ large,
and tune their universities back up to the levels of a few decades ago.
Bonus: If you’re a believer in "global warming", then there’s going to
be a premium on cool, green and wet (and the Baltic Coast becomes the
new Costa Del Sol). Problem solved.
