It would be beneficial to reflect on this year to see how the world is doing, so we can learn and adapt to make the next year better than the last. Thankfully we have studies given to us by various researchers to put this analysis in numbers to give a data-backed view on the 2022 year. Starting with health, there’s a pretty strong correlation between a country’s overall health, its life expectancy, and its fertility rate. As we’ve just hit the 8 billion people milestone, let’s see what’s next.
The healthier a country, the longer its life expectancy tends to be. Healthy countries also tend to have lower fertility rates, following the trend that fertility rates are inverse to life expectancy. However, let these results serve as a learning point on what to do to make a country healthier as well as a focal point to what can be done to assist countries to be healthier and happier.
Going on that, the 5 healthiest countries in the world are Spain(life expectancy = 83.98 years), Italy(life expectancy = 83.94 years), Iceland (life expectancy = 82.52 years), Japan(life expectancy = 85 years), and Switzerland(life expectancy = 83.65 years). On the flip side, the 5 unhealthiest countries to date are Sierra Leone (life expectancy = 44.40 years), Somalia (life expectancy = 47.80 years), Chad (life expectancy = 46.10 years), Central African Republic (life expectancy = 45.90 years), South Sudan (life expectancy = 49.90 years)
Moving on from health, let’s look at how the state of business is on a global scale. Starting with the bad news, global GDP growth has slowed with the current population projected to push the global GDP by just 96%. We are also looking at potential labor shortages, and surpluses are set to become shortfalls, risking $10 trillion by 2030. Moreover, the growing industry demands to serve an aging population. This will result in a boom in assisted living facilities, pharmaceuticals, and hospitals. That having been said, there have been some great high points in this year’s economics.
While it’s true we do have an older population, this can be a benefit because this can increase productivity because longer lives lead to increased per capita. Larger countries lead to an increase in multinational corporations. MNCs and affiliates contributed 36% of global output in 2016 alone. The last point to make is that much of the GDP is shifting toward sub-Saharan Africa. These effective labor growth rates in Africa (2.22%) will outpace Europe and the Americas (0.79%) between 2020 and 2060.
