{"id":20607,"date":"2016-05-14T10:37:14","date_gmt":"2016-05-14T15:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20607"},"modified":"2016-05-14T10:37:14","modified_gmt":"2016-05-14T15:37:14","slug":"which-countries-will-be-tomorrows-winners-losers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20607","title":{"rendered":"Which Countries Will Be Tomorrow’s Winners & Losers?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cienpies Design\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Which Countries Will Be Tomorrow’s Winners & Losers?<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Resources, capital flows & demographics will be key<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The dictum \u201cdemographics is destiny\u201d proposes that all the complexities of finance, society and politics are ultimately guided by demographics: the relative size of each generation, birth rates, death rates, etc.<\/p>\n

For example, an oversized generation of retirees and an undersized generation of workers to support them has far-reaching consequences that can\u2019t be legislated away.<\/p>\n

The influence of demographics isn\u2019t limited to pension costs. Some analysts have made the case that oversized generations of young men align all too well with the launching of wars.<\/p>\n

The point is that birth\/death rates\u2014low and high–have consequences that impact national destinies for decades.<\/p>\n

Another school holds that geography is destiny: if a nation\u2019s geography is favorable, the barriers to prosperity and stability are low, while the barrier is high for nations with unfavorable geography.<\/p>\n

Peter Zeihan, author of the 2014 book,\u00a0The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder<\/em><\/a>, lists the core geographic attributes that are either favorable or unfavorable in ways that influence a nation\u2019s long-term prosperity and built-in geopolitical challenges.<\/p>\n

What does geography have to do with prosperity, stability and geopolitical risks?<\/p>\n

Navigable rivers that reach deep into productive interior regions lower costs of transport dramatically, while natural harbors enable low-cost access to international markets via ships.<\/p>\n

Natural barriers to invasion such as oceans, deserts and mountain ranges dictate whether a nation must spend heavily on military defense of the homeland or whether the cost of defense is lightened by favorable geography.<\/p>\n

Zeihan extends geography into the political realm, noting that nations with difficult-to-defend borders require a strong central government to organize taxation and defense, while nations with few contiguous threats (for example,\u00a0 the U.S.) can be governed in a more decentralized fashion.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cienpies Design\/Shutterstock Which Countries Will Be Tomorrow’s Winners & Losers? Resources, capital flows & demographics will be key The dictum \u201cdemographics is destiny\u201d proposes that all the complexities of finance, society and politics are ultimately guided by demographics: the relative size of each generation, birth rates, death rates, etc. For example, an oversized generation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[10676,127,2889,2218,13815,681],"class_list":["post-20607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-capital-flows","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-demographics","tag-peak-prosperity","tag-peter-zeihan","tag-resources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20608,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20607\/revisions\/20608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}