Page 206 - The Drucker Lectures

The Changing World Economy [ 187

The United States is best off of all developed countries. We
still have a birth rate that is adequate to replace the population—
around 2.4 live births per woman of reproductive age. But we
have this high birth rate only because of the tremendous number
of immigrants in our population. Recent immigrants always still
have the large birth numbers of the countries they come from.
Native-born Americans do not reproduce themselves. Their birth
rate is only around 1.5 or so.
And apart from the United States, all the developed countries
have birth rates far below that needed to maintain their current
population. The lowest birth rates are in Southern Europe—Por-
tugal, Spain, southern France, southern Italy, and Greece. They
have birth rates of one live birth per woman of reproductive age.
That is, they have birth rates so low that for every two people
who die there is only one to replace them. Germany and Japan
both have birth rates of 1.5, which is also way too low to repro-
duce the population. The governmental forecast for Italy is that
the country will have less than half the population it has today in
70 years. There are close to 60 million Italians now. By the end
of the next century there will be, at most, 22 million. In Japan,
government predictions are that the population—now 125 mil-
lion people—will fall to 55 million by the end of the century.
What is even more important than absolute figures is that the
ratio between people of traditional working age (14 to 65) and
people of traditional retirement age (that is, older than 65) is going
to deteriorate very rapidly. In all developed countries, therefore,
the support of a growing number of older people by a shrinking
number of younger people is going to be the central issue for the
next 25 or 30 years. And the only possible solution is that more
and more of the older people will keep on working longer.
The demographics also mean that the basic management
challenge in all the developed countries is a radically new one:
the productivity of the knowledge worker. The developed coun-