| China has made a remarkable achievement since the reform and opening up. Currently, it is a critical period for China’s economic structure transformation, optimizing and upgrading industrial structure has become the main task of China’s economic restructuring in the future. With the improvement of people’s living standards, life expectancy has been significantly improved and the size of old population has been gradually increased. At the same time, China’s fertility rate has begun to drop dramatically since the implementation of the family planning policy. So the ageing process was accelerated. At the present stage, research on the effect of ageing on the transformation of industrial structure becomes great practical significance.Firstly, this paper gives the definition of ageing. Then, we reviews and comments the researches on the effect of ageing on economic growth, consumption and savings, industrial structure done by scholars from China and abroad. We discuss the mechanism of the effect of ageing on industrial structure with the following three possible ways:labor supply, consumer demand, financial markets. Specifically, the scale of labor supply was decreased due to ageing, but the effect of ageing on the effective labor supply is ambiguous. The consumption patterns were changed and the savings were reduced by ageing. The effect of ageing, ceteris paribus, tends to cause the falling of the capital-to-labor ratio, the deterioration of the current account position and the depreciation of the exchange rate, the increasing of public debt to GDP ratios. Besides, a mathematical model to explain the effect of ageing on the industrial structure built here is subject to maximize the utility of consumer demand.Combined with the analysis of status quo, we want to clarify the relationship between ageing and industrial structure further. This article describes the characteristics and trend of ageing and the industrial structure transformation. The logistic model was built to predict the level of ageing in China in the future, and the grey relational analysis was adopted to clarify the relationship between ageing and industrial structure. Afterwards, based on two dimensions of reasonable and advanced industrial structure, TL index and TS index were introduced to measure changes in the industrial structure. This paper empirically tests the impact of ageing on the transformation of industrial structure by using SYS-GMM and a panel data set of 30 provinces in China during 1989-2013. The estimation results show that ageing has a significantly positive effect on the rationalization of industrial structure while a negative effect on the process of advancing the industrial structure. By adding other controlled variables, the results remain robust. In addition, this paper empirically examines the impact of ageing on industrial structure by dividing China into eastern, central and western three regions. The results show that ageing has a vitally positive effect on the rationalization of industrial structure while the effect on the process of advancing the industrial structure is not obvious in western region. And the negative effect is significant in the advancing process while unremarkable during the rationalization process in eastern and central region. In addition, human resource has a positive effect on industrial structure.Finally, according to empirical results and combining with the actual situation in China, some workable suggestions are given on how to deal with the effect of ageing on industrial structure. Four aspects were mainly included:accelerating the reform of cancelling the household registration system, relaxing the family planning policy, encouraging the development of aging industry, and increasing investment in education. |
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