Since the reform and opening-up,China’s rapid economic development largely thanks to a large amount of material capital investment and abundant labor resources.Meanwhile,with the continued decline in fertility and mortality rates,as well as the increase in life expectancy,a corresponding change of the population age structure has occurred.Specifically,it shows a decrease in the proportion of children and working age population and the increase in the proportion of the elderly population.With the gradual disappearance of the demographic dividend and the low return of the material capital investment,Chinese economic growth needs new impetus.More and more research shows that human capital will play an increasingly important role in economic and social development.Therefore,it is necessary to study the impact of population age structure on economic growth from the perspective of human capital accumulation.In view of this,this paper uses the combination of theoretical analysis and empirical analysis.First of all,using the extended overlapping-generations model analyzes the influence of population age structure on human capital accumulation.We use the extended OLG model,which was added to the child dependency ratio,the survival probability and the human capital accumulation equation,to analyze the effect of population age structure change on human capital accumulation caused by the change of children’s dependency ratio or survival rate.From the results of the analysis,we can see the change of population age structure caused by decrease in child dependency ratio or increase in survival probability will promote the human capital investment of family education,which is beneficial to the accumulation of human capital;We also can see the improving the elderly survival probability would increase the proportion of government expenditure on health care,which will occupy the proportion of government expenditure on education,and hinder the accumulation of human capital.Then,we build an empirical model to analyze the direct and indirect effects of population age structure on economic growth by using 1997-2014 provincial panel data.The results show thatthe aging of population age structure,the proportion of working age population,human capital and physical capital have a positive impact on economic growth;Further,we divide the human capital into healthy human capital and educational human capital.We know that aging of population age structure has positive effect on health human capital and the improvement of life expectancy and the decrease of children’s dependency ratio are beneficial to the accumulation of educational human capital.We also can get that educational human capital contributes to economic growth,but the increase of health human capital investment caused by the increase of aging degree is not conducive to the accumulation of human capital and the accumulation of physical capital through crowding out of the investment of physical capital and education,which hinders economic growth.Finally,according to the results of theoretical analysis and empirical analysis,combined with China’s current situation,this paper puts forward some policy recommendations to achieve economic growth in the trend of changing population age structure. |