In a report for the La Jolla Institute, Joel Kotkin shows that New York has a very lowrate of business start-ups compared with other big metropolitan areas.
In Japan, according to Ken Okamura, a strategist with Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, the birth rate has been so low that the working-age population will actually start to decline next year.
He also points out that the rate of both corporate failures and start-ups has remained relatively low - far lower, for example, than in the late 1980s or early 1990s.