Can Demography Explain Portugal’s Growth Slump…
Can Demography Explain Portugal’s Growth Slump Before The Crash?
The above still comes from a recent Financial Times video entitled “Portugal’s Brain Drain”, which I encourage everyone to watch. The issue being raised revolves around the current acceleration of emigration from countries on the EU periphery, largely towards the EU core. Typically the emigrants are young educated people who can’t find work. There is nothing especially surprising in this, since the tendency has long existed for people to move from more depressed areas to economically more dynamic ones. The exodus from Detroit in the United States immediately comes to mind. Or Scottish people getting on the bus to make the fateful journey from Edinburgh or Glasgow to London. The Schengen accord simply extends this process which used to take place within nation states to single market zones, or currency unions. But does this extension have consequences for the participating states which were not anticipated at the outset, and are these consequences all benign?
In addition, this time round in an important sense something is different, since these movements are occurring in the context of a long and difficult economic adjustment, indeed one could almost argue that the people leaving form part of that adjustment.
(Hat tip Rebecca)
This was pretty much predicted, but was masked during periods of growth. Before the unification, each nation could set up economic conditions and policies that we optimal for it. (They may not have done well on the big scale, but they keep things going locally.) Dropping the barriers reduced the number of systems so that fewer areas could run optimally. Just as the 19th century was characterized by people leaving the country for cities and the 20th by people leaving cities for suburbs, you can characterize the 21st by people moving to locally optimal regions.
Population ecologists have been all over this since at least the 19th century. When you isolate systems, for example, by splitting a continent, you get diversification and radiation. When two or more systems merge, you get competition and extinctions. The classic is the reunification of the northern and southern American continents maybe 25 million years ago. All sorts of plants and animals went extinct. Of course, this event split the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and introduced its own diversity.
Very interesting, Dan…I would say no…