摘要
中国即将进入人口老龄化加速的时期,其速度在中等收入和高收入国家中位于前列。利用122个国家跨越25年的面板数据,本文实证分析了不同的老龄化速度对经济增长的影响。结果表明,人口老龄化速度只有在达到一定阈值时,才会对经济增长产生显著的影响。中国未来的人口老龄化进程显然符合快速老龄化组的特征,基于本文的估计参数和人口预测数据估算,仅仅由于人口快速老龄化,中国2020年至2025年的经济增长速度平均每年将会放缓1.07个百分点。抑制劳动力市场规模扩张和减缓全要素生产率增长是老龄化影响经济增长的两个最重要的机制。虽然未来改变人口结构的可能性非常有限,但可以根据快速老龄化影响经济增长的上述途径制定相关的应对策略。
Among the ten largest economies in the world,China is going to experience the fastest population aging in the coming three decades although its current old-age dependency ratio is not yet very high in contrast to those developed countries.In 2022,the first cohort of baby boomers defined as those who were born between 1962 and 1973 will become old people if age 60 is applied to define the elderly.Since then,the process of population aging in China will accelerate,which will bring about a flock of challenges in economic development.The existing literature has already addressed the impact of population aging on economic growth,and most studies observed that population aging would hamper economic growth.Unfortunately,few studies noticed that the speed of population aging per se could have different impacts on economic growth.It is obvious that accelerating population aging is one of essential issues in China’s case.Following the analytical framework of neoclassical growth model,we believe that population aging determines the economic performance through three channels.First,population aging decreases the total labor input by shrinking the size of working age population.Second,population aging reduces the growth rate of total factor productivity(TFP).Third,it reduces savings rate.In addition to those traditional channels,accelerating population aging would be more harmful to economic growth.The traditional industries could lose their advantages quickly,which causes a negative shock to economic growth.A sudden increase of social burden could unbalance the macroeconomy and bring shock to economic development.In addition,the accelerating population aging leaves insufficient time for the labor-saving technology to be fully utilized for growing labor scarcity.Multiple sources of data are applied for empirical work in this paper.Taking advantage of the World Population Prospects 2019 from the Unite Nations,we calculated the speed of population aging in 122 countries between 1990 and 2015.Those data are merged with economic growth in Penn World Table 9.1.To investigate the relevance of speed of population aging,we classified the sample into three groups.To address the potential econometric problems of endogeneity of the speed of population aging,based on the average change trend of the different groups,the virtual speed of population aging is imputed as an instrumental variable.Both ordinary least squares(OLS)and instrumental variables(IV)regressions are applied in the panel data.The empirical results in this paper indicate that,given other things constant,different speed of population aging could result in different economic performance.Once the speed of population aging reaches a certain threshold,it will bring substantial negative shocks to economic growth.We also explored the impacts of speed of population aging on the components of output growth.The regression results show that accelerating population aging has the greatest negative impact on the growth of TFP.In the meantime,accelerating population aging significantly inhibits labor input growth,which also leads to slower economic growth.It seems that the speed of population aging could improve capital output ratio,which could contribute to economic growth.However,the contribution could not offset the negative impacts.Accelerating population aging in China applies to the feature of the fast group.Based on the regression results in the fast group,we may predict that,given other things constant,the economic growth rates would decline by 1.07 percentage points per annum from 2020 to 2025 simply due to the accelerating population aging.Policy implications in this study are rich and clear.To prevent the negative shocks induced by accelerating population aging,two policy directions are of great importance,including inhibiting the decrease of labor inputs and coping with the slowdown of TFP growth.In detail,China ought to immediately kick off the reforms on extension of retirement ages and on pension system in combination with the policies to encourage labor participation.It is also important to encourage the application of labor-saving technology to offset the negative impacts of fast aging on TFP.
作者
都阳
封永刚
DU Yang;FENG Yonggang(The Institute of Population and Labor Economics,Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2021年第2期71-88,共18页
Economic Research Journal
基金
国家社科基金“开启第二个百年新征程”重大研究专项“现代化进程中人民美好生活需要与人的全面发展指标研究”(批准号:18VBN017)
2018年度马克思主义理论研究和建设工程重大项目“新时代‘两个阶段’的战略安排研究”(批准号:2018MZD010)的阶段性研究成果
关键词
快速老龄化
经济增长
冲击
Accelerating Population Aging
Economic Growth
Shock
