【英文】HSBC报告：全球人口：一个世纪变化的描绘（54页）

英文研究报告 2021年03月05日 07:27 管理员

If you’re looking for investment ideas for the next month or so, this report will not help you. However, if you want to understand what ultimately shapes the world and the long-term drivers that are going to dominate various regions for decades – this report will be right up your alley. Demographics is an incredibly wide topic and the world is a big place. This report raises as many questions as it attempts to answer. Many of the issues raised here will be discussed in more detail in forthcoming reports that delve deeper into some of these issues. And some of the findings also build on our previous extensive work on demographics, including Asia Demographics: Large shifts are coming soon, 4 August 2020. One of our first starting points is that demographics are similar to the weather – there is little you can do to stop it, and there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ weather. A farmer will love the rain, a sunbather won’t. You can complain about it, but rain will fall. Instead, it’s all about being prepared for the demographic shifts; to keep with our weather analogy, it’s about having an umbrella at hand, or sunscreen if it shines. This report highlights these different tectonic shifts.

If we can summarise this report in a few sentences, it would be something like the following: Almost every country faces a demographic challenge of one form or another. Either it is rapid ageing or a rapidly growing population that may make it hard to create enough jobs. The world’s population is expected to approach 10bn by 2060 (source: UN World Population Prospects 2019), up from 8bn today, but in many parts of the world, we will see shrinking workforces and major fiscal challenges. India is expected to become the world’s most populous country by 2025, while more people all over the world will move to mid-tier cities, particularly in Asia and Africa. But only a few countries may be well-placed to benefit from this rapid population growth: we would highlight Egypt with its investment in education that will pay dividends for decades for its young population. Asians, however, are turning older, living longer, flocking to congested cities and generally staying in small households, mostly because women are having fewer children and working more. They save more and because households are getting smaller, they are spending more and spending it differently. We identify long-term investment themes that are driven by these trends.