Es sagt etwas aus über die Wirtschaft, über Demographie und über das Lohnniveau in Deutschland. Es sagt weiterhin aus, das ein Export-Surplus Kapital-Export bedeutet und das kann für ein Land niemals auf längere Sicht gut gehen.
1937 veröffentlichte JM Keynes in der Eugenies Review einen Artikel mit dem Titel 'Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population'. Keynes behandelt die Auswirkungen einer sinkenden Bevölkerungszahl auf die Wirtschaft und die Investitionsleistungen und er beginnt so:
An increasing population has a very important influence on the demand for capital.
Not only does the demand for capital - apart from technical changes and an improved standard of life - increase more or less in proportion to population. But, business expectations being based much more on present than on prospective demand, an era of increasing population tends to promote optimism, since demand will in general tend to exceed, rather than fall short of, what was hoped for. Moreover a mistake, resulting in a particular type of capital being in temporary over-supply, is in such conditions rapidly corrected. But in an era of declining population the opposite is true. Demand tends to be below what was expected, and a state of over-supply is less easily corrected. Thus a pessimistic atmosphere may ensue; and,although at long last pessimism may tend to correct itself through its effect on supply, the first result to prosperity of a change-over from an increasing to a declining population may be very disastrous.
Hier ist der Kreditzuwachs bei Immobilien in Deutschland abgebildet:
Hier Geldmenge und Kreditwachstum:
Es folgt die Demographie:
Keynes nun zu einem Szenario bei fallender Bevölkerungszahl. Um hier Zuwachs zu erreichen, ist ein Anstieg des Konsums notwendig oder ein Fall der Inflationsrate. Die Inflationsrate ist schon äusserst niedrig und das Konsumverhalten sieht man in der Grafik unten (deutlich ist hoffentlich dieser sagenhafte Kaufrausch zu erkennen):
Now, if the number of consumers is falling off and we cannot rely on any significant technical lengthening of the period of production, the demand for a net increase of capital goods is thrown back into being wholly dependent on an improvement in the average level of consumption or on a fall in the rate of interest. I will attempt to give a few very rough figures to illustrate the order of magnitude of the different factors involved.
Nebenbei bemerkt, ist auch deutlich die Geburt des Euro zu ersehen und die Auswirkungen.
Im weiteren nimmt dann Keynes Stellung zu Malthus, sieht aber die grössere Gefahr für wachsenden Wohlstand in einer abnehmenden Bevölkerung:
What relation do these views bear to the older Malthusian theory that more capital resources per head (chiefly envisaged by the older writers in the shape of Land) must be of immense benefit to the standard of life, and that the' growth of population was disastrous to human standards by retarding this increase? It may seem at first sight that I am contesting this old theory and am arguing, on the contrary, that a phase of declining population will make it immensely more difficult than before to maintain prosperity.
Unquestionably a stationary population does facilitate a rising standard of life; but on one condition only - namely that the increase in resources or in consumption, as the case may be, which the stationariness of population makes possible, does actually take place. For we have now learned that we have another devil at our elbow at least as fierce as the Malthusian - namely the devil of unemployment escaping through the breakdown of effective demand.
Man substituiere hier "devil of unemployment" mit 'Teufel des Billiglohns' und man erkennt den Grund für die desolate Entwicklung des privaten Konsums in Deutschland.
