Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?

This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.

Charles-Henri Colombier is Director of Macroeconomic Analysis and Forecasting at the Rexecode Institute, based in Paris. His job is to analyze and forecast the French and global economy. And what strikes him most is how consistently the impact of demographic change gets underestimated by analysts and decision makers alike.

Take Germany. Every year, 400,000 more people turn 65 than turn 20. The working-age population is shrinking fast. The result: since 2019, Germany’s cumulative GDP growth has been just 0.5%. The Germans like to talk about Schwarze Null when it comes to deficits. They’ve now achieved it in growth.

In France, the number of yearly deaths has overtaken the number of yearly births, and a country that spent thirty years building policy around the fear of mass unemployment may have quietly turned the page on that era without realizing it. Meanwhile, the future of the global economy may come down to a race between the downward drag of demographics and the upward push of AI and robotics. Colombier’s assessment: the orders of magnitude may not be very different.

Could immigration solve it? Economically, yes. Politically, that’s another story: even Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, ideologically hostile to immigration, is being forced to reconsider under demographic pressure.

Demographics, Colombier suggests, is the one law of gravity no country can ultimately defy.

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