Yet having more people on the planet may also be associated with a slowdown in economic growth, Lagarde noted, because an aging population is less able to work and may be fiscally burdensome for states, due to larger costs associated with health care and retirement security.
A 2010 paper (pdf) from the IMF, for instance, found that "a 10 percentage point increase in the initial debt-to-GDP ratio is associated with a slowdown in annual real per capita GDP growth of around 0.2 percentage points per year, with the impact being somewhat smaller in advanced economies". Still, similar questions about causality apply to these papers too.
This cool zone in the North Atlantic Ocean appears to be associated with a slowdown in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), one of the key drivers in global ocean circulation.
The collapse of China's bubble is associated with a slowdown in growth in China, which could be fairly sharp, although that would not be my bet.
The fact is that there really aren't a lot of episodes in which advanced countries had high debt, and many of those episodes — like Japan or Italy in recent decades — are clearly associated with growth slowdowns that were happening for other reasons.Why, exactly, would you expect to see countries doing well have high debt in the first place?
Specifically, they found that a 10percentt increase in SBA loans in a county was associated with a 2percentt slowdown in that county's income growth.
Scale effects in endogenous growth models have been questioned by the fact that a remarkable increase in the number of scientists and engineers engaged in R&D in the postwar United States was indeed associated with a productivity slowdown.
"Since 2008, private sector debt relative to GDP has risen by 80 percentage points to about 175% – such large increases have internationally been associated with sharp growth slowdowns and often financial crises", the IMF said.
The demons of larger portion sizes, less exercise and the metabolic slowdown associated with becoming overweight have become familiar, but there is hope (and challenge) in the current conversation surrounding obesity for parents.
"It is also possible," says the report, "that the deceleration in house prices and the cumulative impact on highly indebted households of past increases in interest rates may be associated with a more prolonged slowdown".Quite so.
