Empirical Research On The Changes Of The Age Structure Of Population To Economic Development

After the reform and opening up, the Chinese economy has got a rapid development on the basis of the hard-working, low-cost labor recourse. However, the labor resources advantages gradually reduce with the changes in age structure of the population. Cai Fang, director of the Population Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had pointed out that China’s working-age population will cease to grow in2013, a series of problems has become increasing prominent caused by the changing demographic structure with the demographic dividend will soon disappear. The extensive mode of economic development seriously, the traditional labor-intensive industries has some difficult in labor employment. Meanwhile, college graduates often can not find work, fertility rate continued to decline, working-age population gradually reduce, aging population has been increasingly a serious problem and so on.This article is to explore the impact of changes in the age structure of the population to economic growth in this context. First a general introduction to the change of population and the reason about this is given since the founding of our country, after this introduced China’s population age structure and trends. Then further theoretical analysis about the impact of the changes in the age structure of the population in China to three decades of high-speed economic development, and how about an inherent connection between the two, and then got a theoretical analysis framework with the expansion of the Solow model and finally use panel data model to study the impact of changes in the population age structure on the level of economic development between different regions of China. This paper is been divided into6chapters.The first chapter is the introduction, the theoretical and practical background of this paper is analyzed, and the organization of the whole paper is laid out.The second chapter is to review the foreign domestic literature and find out the deficiency of current research, after that, give the basis thought of this paper.The third chapter is a general introduction about the condition of the transition process of China’s population and also the reasons about it.The fourth chapter is a more detailed analysis of the impact of the demographic dividend thanks to the transition process of China’s population to economic growth. It’s mainly about the effect mechanism of how the transition process of China’s population affect the economic development level by labor supply and savings rate.The fifth chapter is the empirical analysis of the changes in the age structure of the population in China. The oretical analysis is given by expend the Solow Model, and then explore the effect mechanism of how the transition process of China’s population effect the economic development level among the different regions of China by Panel Data Motel.The sixth chapter is the corresponding policy recommendations based on the research results.The empirical result shows that the dependency ratio of population is negative at almost of China, that is to say the dependency ratio of population has a negative impaction to the economy development, the dependency ratio of western region is bigger, that means it has a more impact on the economy development. The coefficient of savings rate is relatively smaller in the eastern and western areas while it’s bigger in the central areas, and the coefficient of savings rate in the northeast follows in the central areas. It shows that savings rate has a smaller impact on the economy development than consumption and export in the western and eastern areas compared to other regions. The economy developed faster in the eastern region, it’s mainly driven by the primary and secondary industries. There has been much more national support for the economy development of middle region, a great deal capital investment has been put into this area, such as human capital investment, it forms a high level of investment and savings, especially in Anhui Province. As demographic dividend despairs gradually and the aging population increases, there has been great negative impact to the economy development.There are two innovations of this paper. First, there is less mathematical derivation in the most previous empirical analysis which based on the least squares method to estimate parameters. Second, most recent empirical analysis are largely based on the whole country, there are less analysis on the concrete areas of the country, it can not tell the difference among the areas. There are also two inadequacies, first, variable problem, this paper analyzed the impact of the total population dependency ratio and the savings rate to the level of economic development when conducting empirical research. Population dependency ratio accounted reaction how structural changes affect economic growth only from the working-age population, and does not reflect changes in the quality of the labor force. This is quite different and controversial, but also not easy to obtain the relevant data for the various regions of the country, instead of the quality of the labor force indicators in academia. Second, the study on the age structure of the population on economic growth should be considered from a longer time span to examine the desirability of limitations, because time span of data from the1995-2010was inevitably beneath accuracy.