The
issues

• The world will experience significant, but decelerating population growth. Meanwhile, people will continue their net migration towards cities while many rural areas will get depopulated.
• Due mainly to explosive growth in many emerging markets, the world will experience its largest economic growth ever, and global real purchasing power will have quadrupled by 2050.
• Aging will be another major theme. The number of elderly will explode, and perhaps surprisingly, 90% of this growth will take place in emerging markets.
• More and more industries will essentially become information technologies, and this will vastly accelerate their development pace.
• Global knowledge and innovation will continue to evolve exponentially, and by 2050, our combined commercially/technically useful knowledge will be 40-50 times as large as in 2010.
• We will not run out of any commodities, but we may experience temporary shortages of energy and metals due to the explosive growth in emerging markets
• New technologies will provide the solutions to environmental problems, and many of these will be rapidly reduced as our wealth and technical acumen grow.

Lars Tvede