Posts Tagged ‘Immigration’
The beauty-economic growth connection and why being hospitable matters
Among the random links I have saved up was one to a post headed: Does Beauty Drive Economic Growth?
Now can’t find where it came from, so sorry no Hat Tip to whoever led me to it.
Anyway, does it? Is there a connection between beauty and economic growth?
Umm a little bit I think. However, it does make a good headline. Sucked me in.
But behind this beauty myth are some solid ideas about what drives economic growth. And some good news for NZ.
Where there is a connection is between our passion (or attachment) for a community and growth.
And yeah, some of that passion relates to beauty – to the splendour of the parks, the majesty of a harbour, the leafiness of neighbourhoods etc.
But it’s not all about beauty. There’s lots of innovation and rapid growth springing out of less than beautiful surroundings – from inner city warehouses and lofts through to Silicon Valley.
The evidence for all this a Soul of the Community study, commissioned by the Knight Foundation covering 26 US cities.
What the study actually showed was that there are three main qualities that drive people’s attachment to place:
• social offerings, such as entertainment venues and places to meet,
• openness (how welcoming a place is) and
• the area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces).
You’ll notice that money, materialistic-type qualities are missing here.
“Instead, attachment is most closely related to how accepting a community is of diversity, its wealth of social offerings, and its aesthetics. This is not to say that jobs and housing aren’t important,” say the authors.
“Residents must be able to meet their basic needs in a community in order to stay. However, when it comes to forming an emotional connection with the community, there are other community factors which often are not considered when thinking about economic development.
“These community factors seem to matter more when it comes to attaching residents to their community.”
Attachment is “an important metric for communities, since it links to key outcomes like local economic growth (GDP)”.
The survey found the places with the lowest levels of attachment were car-wreck cities like Detroit and Gary, Indiana, while they were highest in places like Boulder, Colorado.
So you’d think, if the above is true, that countries and cities looking to attract investors, talent and skills should concentrate on their boosting their social offerings, their welcome mats and travelogue posters.
Paula Ellis, a Knight Foundation vice president says the significant ‘takeaway’ of the survey is “to design interventions to increase residents’ attachment to the place they live”.
“Our theory,” says Jon Clifton from the pollsters Gallup “is that when a community’s residents are highly attached, they will spend more time there, spend more money; they’re more productive and tend to be more entrepreneurial”.
And the good news for NZ? We are a place where the people of the world want to live because we have an open and friendly society and a beautiful and relatively clean environment. Though we are a bit of a cultural and entertainment backwater.
So all this is further reason to protect our clean green image. Also we need to be more worried about stories in the international media that indicate we are not a welcoming society.
And please find some way of delivering us more great live music.
Do immigrant nations have an edge in economic growth?
Is it significant that three of the top four nations in the UN’s Human Development Index – Australia, NZ and the US - are immigrant nations?
If it wasn’t for Norway’s luck in having a belly full of oil, then it’d be the top three.
Is this outperformance by the “New World” just some sort of geographical/historical accident?
BigCake figures, that as in life, what countries do with their luck is what matters.
Anyway Karl Smith, Assistant Professor of Public Economics and Government at the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reckons massive immigration is one of three reasons why the US is so rich.
You’re inclined to forget it at the moment, but the US depending on what measure you use always ranks in the top 10 wealthiest nations in the world. (US gross domestic product at purchasing power parity par capita US$46,000; NZ $26,600).
Smith, in a blog, puts the US’s wealth performance down to a combination of three big factors:
• The Common Law
• The Great Scientific Exodus during WWII and
• Massive immigration.
Actually 2 and 3 look to be much the same thing. And the US was rich before WWII.
However, commenting on the blog The Economist says Smith is on to something important in discussing immigration and talent.
“The economic geography of the world is lumpy, and talent likes to clump together into centres of innovation.
“Through fortune and foresight, America managed to develop world-leading centres of talent in places like Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York. Relatively open immigration rules and the promise of a safe harbour for war refugees, including persecuted Jews, helped build these knowledge centres.
“When one combines that innovative capacity with a system that makes it relatively easy to develop ideas and relatively lucrative to exploit them economically, the potential is there for rapid and sustained growth.”
But this doesn’t fully describe the economic performance of the twins from downunder.
I reckon it’s something to do with the energy and dreams of the new immigrants. They want a better life for themselves and their children and in the process drag the wealth of their new home country up with them.
But then consider what happened to Argentina, another immigrant country blessed with an abundance of natural resources. It went down the tubes. So the type of immigrant is important too.
Argentina may never have had the immigrant energy of the US, Australia and NZ thanks to its stultified social structure, but this energy can weaken (or is it inevitably?).
The common law factor is I think pretty dodgy. (Common law being the law of precedent inherited by former British colonies, including the US).
Smith says “you’ll notice that four of the top five countries in the Human Development Index have the Common Law and the top, Norway, is a awash in oil. Without the petro-kronors they probably wouldn’t be so hot.”
Depends how you want to spin this – 5 of the top 10 countries in the index don’t have common law.
And dismissing Norway because of its oil wealth is also dodgy. Nigeria also has large reserves of oil but it hasn’t done that country much good.
Yeah, so it’s complicated when you try to isolate various factors in economic growth.
Gallup – NZ second in world as preferred place to emmigrate to
Sometimes our fragile Kiwi egos get overly hung up on our immigration loss.
What we forget is that NZ is still a sh!t hot place to live and many people around the world would give an arm and leg for the right to reside here.
In Gallup’s latest Potential Net Migration Index (PNMI), NZ ranks second to Singapore as a migration destination. Ego boost – Australia is 6th. Rounding out the top seven are: Saudi Arabia, Canada, Switzerland and Kuwait.
According to the PNMI, if all adults worldwide who wantedto migrate permanently to other countries actually moved where they wanted to today, these top-PNMI countries would see their adult populations double or even triple. The index reflects people’s wishes rather than their intentions.
The PNMI score is the estimated on the number of adults who would like to move permanently out of a country if the opportunity arose, subtracted from the estimated number who would like to move into it, as a proportion of the total adult population.
The higher the resulting positive PNMI value, the larger the potential net adult population gain.
The top rankings are:
• Singapore: +219%
• New Zealand: +184%
• Saudi Arabia: +176%
The last one is a bit weird, but the survey only included Arab nationals and expatriates.
BTW – BigCake supports increased immigration to NZ.
Countries of course have negative PNMIs – countries that could potentially lose as much as half of their adult populations to migration. These include Liberia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Haiti, and Sierra Leone at the bottom of the list.
Hat tip – Richard Florida