Germany and population growth

A Rapidly Aging Population Is Not a Depression Problem by Dean Baker

Matt O'Brien had a good piece in Wonkblog pointing out that the current downturn in the euro zone has been worse for these countries than the Great Depression. However it does get part of the story wrong. 

At one point it outlines the troubles of the region: 

"The combination of zombie banks, a rapidly aging population and, most importantly, too-tight money have pushed it into a "lowflationary" trap that makes it hard to grow, and is even harder to escape from. That's what happened to Japan in the 1990s, and now, 20 years later, its nominal GDP is actually smaller than it was then. "

The aging of the population, and therefore a slow-growing or declining labor force, does not belong on the list of problems here. What matters for well-being is per capita growth. (That is not the only thing that matters, but insofar as GDP matters it is GDP per capita.) If the population is growing very slowly or even shrinking slowly, it will likely be associated with lower overall growth, but not necessarily with lower per capita GDP growth. 

Germany has managed to get its unemployment rate down to 5.1 percent, compared to 7.8 percent before the downturn, in spite of having considerably lower growth than the United States over this period. Its employment rate for prime age workers (ages 25-54) has risen by 3.0 percentage points, compared to a drop of 3.5 percentage points in the United States.

As a result of its slow population growth, few in Germany would see its slow economic growth as being a problem. In fact, most view the economy as being relatively prosperous right now. This is one of the reasons that the country is reluctant to support measures that would help its neighbors, since Germany is not really sharing in their pain at the moment. Similiarly, Japan's slow population growth meant that most people in the country were not suffering in the way that its weak GDP growth may have suggested.