Empirical Study Change Of Age Structure On Economic Growth

With the demographic transition of a country or region, changes of the population age structure have become one of the important factors to economic growth. With the accelerating pace of population aging, in a certain period of the future the demographic development of China will exhibit "getting old before being rich". The decline of advantages of the population age structure will also bring more profound impacts on economic growth. Therefore, for the sake of further in-depth understanding of the importance of the population age structure to economic growth and studying how to better hold advantages of the age structure and how to promote sustainable economic growth, it is significant to study the impacts that changes of our country’s population age structure have on economic growth.Firstly, based on literature research, the paper has a systematic review of foreign and domestic relevant literature. Then on this basis, the paper builds a basic theoretical framework of the mechanism from which the population age structure has impacts on economic growth. Based on the quantitative analysis and descriptions on the situation of China’s population age structure, it conducts empirical analysis on the impacts that the population age structure has on economic growth since the reform and opening up of China. Finally it analyzes the fast development of population aging in the future and its impacts on economy and explores new ideas for sustainable economic development.In the empirical analysis, the paper analyses economic effects of the population age structure respectively from the labor supply by the change of working age population proportion and the dependency load of labor force by the change of dependency ratio. Through the multiple linear regressions of the population age structure and economic growth factors by using the extended model of Cobb-Douglas production function, the paper comes to the following conclusions:since the reform and opening up, changes of China’s population age structure have effectively promoted economic growth through increasing the labor input. Meanwhile, the decline of the dependency ratio has promoted economic growth through enhancing labor effectiveness, increasing social savings rate and etc. The decline of the children dependency ratio has strengthened the promoting function of labor input to economic growth, while the increase of the old dependency ratio has weakened it.