The Merryn Somerset Webb interview: What democracies can learn from China

The election cycle is too short-termist to deal with our long-term economic problems, says Dambisa Moyo

I first interviewed Dambisa Moyo around two years ago. She was giving a TED talk (which has now had more than 1.7 million views) and had so little time that in order to talk to her properly I had to drive out to the airport with her. It was worth it. So I was thrilled when I asked her if she would talk to us again that she not only agreed to sit down for a proper chat but to have it videoed too. You can see the video here, but we wasted no time with small talk (well, not while the cameras were on anyway). We kicked off with what's wrong with the global economy.

Moyo's second book is called How The West Was Lost: Fifty Years Of Economic Folly And The Stark Choices Ahead. Her point here is that three main factors drive structural growth labour (quantity and quality), capital and, of course, productivity. And we have failed to deal with the "substantive and long-term" problems with all three over the last 50 years. Look at labour 90% of the world's population lives in the emerging markets and 70% of that group are under the age of 25. But in the developed markets we have a very "negative demographic story of ageing and the larger pressures on the public purse".

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