Spot the difference

This Greek thing seems to be all the rage on some blogs I could mention, but I struggle to get excited by it. According to the Grauniad website today, The IMF views a debt-to-GDP ratio above 120% as unsustainable. Here, for some context, are some recent data for a couple of countries:

I won't be offering prizes for guessing the identities of Countries A and B. One of them has a collapsing population (1 million down in the past 5y, will be dropping at a rate of 1m per year by 2030), a flatlining economy, and a skyrocketing worker-to-dependent ratio that will exceed unity by the middle of the century (and keep on getting worse). The other is Greece.

Going down...

The fall in Japan's population is accelerating pretty much as expected:

Japan's population has entered full-scale decline and shrank by a record 183,000 people over the past year

Of course this is accompanied by a "greying" of the population and reduction in the workforce as a proportion of the total. One rational response might be to encourage immigration to make up the numbers, but in fact Japan has been kicking out foreigners at quite a rate recently. The reduction in non-Japanese population actually contributed 47,000 to the total decline. This is all part of the current trend towards isolationism. Perhaps they think they can replace workers with robots.

Meanwhile, the economy has recently been back in deflation, though not by enough to make up for the pay cuts.