The shortage of nurses is expected to intensify in the near future and AMS' short range forecast has nurses on top of the list of immediate shortages. Although there is considerable interest in nursing training - the number of applicants with this as their first choice amounted to 3.2 per place on a course 10 for the previous academic year - the number of course places is insufficient. Teachers have also succeeded in raising their wages in recent years. Last year wages for upper secondary school teachers increased by an average of 6 per cent. The baby boom of the 1990s means that the shortage of teachers will increase and peak in 2005, when there will be a shortage of 11 23 000 teachers - the greatest need is for upper secondary school teachers. There may be a need for relative wage changes to encourage more people to train as teachers and to remain in the profession. If we take the example of a teacher in science subjects, such as mathematics and general science, this person would probably also be capable of attaining a Master of Engineering degree. The wage difference between these professions is very large. The highest paid upper secondary school teachers in mathematics and science earn approximately SEK 25 000 kronor a month, while a 12 competent graduate engineer can earn many times this amount.
So the problem of global imbalances is hardly new. It was behind many of the currency crises in the post-war period and exercised the participants at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. And for the past decade it was a regular item on the agenda of international meetings of finance officials at the IMF, G7 and elsewhere. But the incompatibility of different countries’ policy frameworks has proved difficult to resolve. At the Bretton Woods Conference, the British economist John Maynard Keynes identified the asymmetry of the obligations placed on surplus and deficit countries as the main source of the problem. He had argued that, “the process of adjustment is compulsory for the debtor and voluntary for the creditor. If the creditor does not choose to make, or allow, his share of the adjustment, he suffers no inconvenience. For whilst a country’s reserve cannot fall below zero, there is no ceiling which sets an upper limit.” Both the British and the Americans put forward proposals for a system with more symmetric obligations – but without success. For most of the post-war period, the obligations on debtor countries, asymmetric though they may have been, prevented the imbalances from becoming too big. More recently, the fact that the largest deficit country, the United States, was the issuer of the world’s reserve currency allowed the imbalances to continue for a long period, inducing a sense of complacency and threatening the stability of the global economy.