The Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Population Age Structure On Economic Growth In China

Age structure of population in China has been changing fast since the full implementation of one-child policy in 1970 s.It is widely believed that age structure change is one of the reasons for China's rapid economic growth. China's economy has already entered into the phase of structure adjustment after nearly 40 years of high-speed growth. The ongoing change of age structure is one of the realities that the structure adjustment of China's economy has to face. At present, “few children” and “aging trend” of population are getting severe. And “demographic dividend” in China will be disappearing. Therefore, it is greatly significant for further researching the age-structure's economic influence.Most of the research concentrated on the linear relationship between age structure changes and economic growth, the paper tried to investigate the non-linear relationship by getting quadratic terms of Children's dependency ratio and elderly dependency ratio involved through “Cobb-Douglas” function. And also it tried to reveal the difference among short-term impact, medium-term impact and long-term impact of dependence ratios on economic growth. The results of empirical analysis on Chinese panel data from 1989 to 2012 reveal that:(1)Age structure has significant non-linear effect on economic growth; children's dependency ratio has a “U” relationship with economic growth and always on the left of “U”; elderly dependency ratio has an "inverted U" relationship with economic growth, taking 17.07 of the maximum value, and the inflection point will occur around 2020.(2)Children's dependency ratio has the greatest impact in short term, while elderly dependency ratio has the greatest impact in medium term.(3)The change of age structure is one of the significant causes of China's economic growth. According to the measured results, 10.58% of China's economic growth was attributed to the decline of children's dependency ratio, and 3.93% was attributed to the increase of elderly dependency ratio. So 14.51% of China's economic growth was attributed to age structure changes.(4)the marginal contribution of the increase of elderly dependency ratio is always larger than that of the decrease of children's dependency ratio, but the gap has been getting smaller.