Study On The Influence Of Population Aging On The Total Factor Productivity Of China's Industry

Population is an important factor in promoting technological innovation and economic growth.Since the reform and opening up,China has achieved rapid economic growth with its abundant labor supply advantage.It can be said that the “demographic dividend” has laid the foundation for China's economic take-off in the past four decades.However,when the people's living standards have improved significantly,it is accompanied by the reality of low birth rate,low mortality and extended life expectancy.Therefore,as early as 2000,China has entered the ranks of an aging society.Many scholars have pointed out China's “Lewis Turning Point” has arrived,and the practical problems of shortage of labor supply and rising labor costs have caused people to worry about whether China's economic development will be severely affected by the aging of the population.At the same time,China has entered a critical period of restructuring and transforming economic growth.The government has repeatedly pointed out in its work report that it must shift the driving force of economic growth to relying on total factor productivity,which means that we need to change the past to rely solely on the key factor is to invest in the development of the economy,and now it is necessary to rely more on technological progress to promote economic growth.For a long time,industry has been a basic industry supporting China's economic development.With the advent of the industry 4.0 era,whether it can achieve the growth mode driven by industry total factor productivity will become the winning key point of the new round of industrial revolution.We must clearly understand that with the advent of the ageing population,the quantitative “demographic dividend” that has supported China's industrial development has ceased,so in the face of the fundamental fact of population aging,improve the total factor productivity of industry whether will be hindered is very important.Only by clarifying the relationship between the two can we help to correctly understand the opportunities and challenges caused by the aging of the population to the current industrial development of China.The literature on how population aging affects economic development is very costly.Most of the existing literature are studied from the aspects of economic growth,industrial structure upgrading,and foreign trade.On the basis of literature reading,this paper takes the industrial total factor productivity as the object and enriches the research perspective of population aging effect.Firstly,this paper sorts out the theory and measurement methods of population aging and total factor productivity.On this basis,through the change of the quantity and quality of labor supply,it analyzes the mechanism of population aging affecting total factor productivity,And puts forward two hypotheses: population aging affects total factor productivity through capital technology substitution and human capital respectively.Secondly,the causes and characteristics of China's population aging and the measurement results of industrial total factor productivity are analyzed.Thirdly,the panel model is used to measure the relationship between population aging and industrial total factor productivity.The empirical results show that:(1)Population aging has formed a certain “force” for the improvement of China's industrial total factor productivity.And when using the old-age ratio index for robustness test,its positive impact is still significant;(2)The aging of the population can promote the improvement of industrial total factor productivity by “forced” capital technology substitution and human capital investment,and the effect of the latter is greater.Both mechanism hypotheses are verified by the mediation effect model.(3)After partial sample regression,it is found that the positive impact of population aging on industrial total factor productivity will vary depending on the degree of aging,and for areas with lower aging,The positive promotion effect is greater;in addition,the impact on the eastern,central and western regions is also different.In general,because the degree of aging in the central and western regions is moderate and the high marginal productivity of capital,the role of population aging is more pronounced.The “forced” effect of population aging is more obvious.Finally,based on the analysis of empirical results,it proposes policy recommendations on how to play a positive role in population aging and thus increase industrial total factor productivity.