Part 2: Economic Health Indices by Country, and the Prognoses That They Imply

While in Part 1 I showed economic health measures indicator by indicator, in this part I show them country by country. By turning to the countries that you are interested in, you will be able to see all of the influences and what they imply for economic growth over the next 10 years for each of those countries in one simple table. They are shown in the order of projected economic growth rates and can be found by looking at the table of contents on the next page. The projected economic growth rates for each country are shown and attributed to a) the average annual growth rate of the working population and b) the projected average annual change in the output per worker. The projected change in the average annual output per worker is determined two thirds by that country's projected productivity growth and one third by the size of its debt burdens. The determinants of each country's productivity growth are shown in several gauges that reflect each of the drivers (e.g. cost competitiveness, work attitudes, etc.). These are conveyed in tables that show – 1) the deviation of that country's determinant from the world average (shown in standard deviation terms), and 2) the ranking of that country (among the 20 countries shown) for that indicator. In other words, this one simple table will provide you virtually all that you need to know to gauge each country's economic health and its prospects for the next 10 years. By scanning the table and reading the accompanying text, you will be able to see a country’s biggest strengths, and biggest weaknesses. The projections do not take into consideration exogenous factors such as the discoveries of natural resources and wars which will influence growth rates and are beyond my ability to forecast. The table will not provide the thinking or the individual statistics that are behind each of these gauges. Should you wish to see the individual statistics behind these gauges, you can get them in the appendix to this section. Unfortunately, we are not able to share the statistics underlying our indebtedness measures, which are proprietary. To be clear, these health indicators show where the current conditions will lead, not what is inevitable. If countries change the influences on their health, like individuals who stop smoking and start exercising, they can improve their prognoses. In fact, while we expect the countries that are more efficient (as measured by our gauges) to do better than those that are less efficient, we expect those that remove their impediments to have the biggest improvements to growth – just as China’s strong growth over the last couple decades resulted from it ending its closed-door policy. It should be noted that there was no subjective judgment used in coming up with these numbers, or even in coming up with the text that explains these indicators. Both the numbers and the text were computer generated. As explained in Part 1 my process of converting indicators into health gauge measures and in turn into projections for growth is very straightforward. To help it to be better understood and to provide each person with their own abilities to vary the processes in the ways they prefer, I am willing to make these statistics and processes open to those who are interested so that they can assess the relationships and change the weights in the ways they think are best.