Saturday, June 16, 2018

Up to 500 Million Sub-Saharan Africans Would Like to Move to Europe; Mayfair, Monte Carlo Favored

That's one of the points made in a March 2018 Pew Research Center report.
The first part.
The second part is from January's "Algorithm matches refugees with best place to resettle":
It appears that Mayfair, Silicon Valley, Monte Carlo and Zürich come out on top....
Which comment was not just fāke news but the obviously borderline demented ravings of an analyst who has to get out more often. The African population in Mayfair is mainly composed of Nigerian kleptocrats, not refugees.
Ahem.

There is a serious purpose to this post though. I wanted to gather in one place some of our prior links on the problem/opportunity of African demographics and some policy suggestions that are emerging.

Most recently we had last month's "George Soros at the European Council on Foreign Relations, May 29, 2018 'How to Save Europe'" which was preceded by:
...In other refugee news George Soros announced at Davos he would be putting refugees on a blockchain:
George Soros Announces Blockchain Plans to Solve Refugee Crisis at Davos
No word on an ICO. We'll update when it comes. 
In April 2017's "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough" we had a graphic depiction of the challenge:
This may be one of the more important graphics you are likely to come across today.
Africa's population is projected by the United Nations to reach 2 billion people by 2045, 4 billion before the end of the century:


http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/09/pop_image_1/f03a2d201.jpg
And the headline story, from the International Monetary Fund, April 7...

The graph was reprised in October 2017's "Needed: 800 Million Jobs For Africa".

Also in April 2017 was "To Jumpstart Development, Should We Give Africa Bonds a Whirl?":
The problem, as always, is keeping the money from sticking to the hands of the kleptocrats,
And whether investment will actually do any good.

Following on "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough" here are a couple women who have thought about this stuff, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a former two-time Finance Minister of Nigeria and World Bank Managing Director, currently a senior advisor at Lazard and Nancy Birdsall, former EVP at the Inter-American Development Bank where she ran a $30 billion loan portfolio....
And this year's "Population: 'Future Hubs of Africa and Asia'" on where to focus efforts and resources:
...This demographic boom could, under the right conditions, result in a regional or even a global economic boom. These conditions are first and foremost 1) an increase in literacy and 2) an improvement in governance, in the poorest countries where the population is growing rapidly. Higher literacy, in particular among young women, sets off a chain reaction that drives down infant mortality rates and total fertility rates. In time, this evolution leads to a falling dependency ratio and creates an opportunity for the economy to realize a demographic dividend. This was in large part the dynamic that created the China boom in the past three decades....
We'll be back with more.

Possibly related:
"J.P. Morgan is deploying photos of sausages to lure staff to Frankfurt"
Prospect List: "Africa May Have Up to 200 Hidden Billionaires, Mobius Says"