The Impact Of China’s Aging Population On Technological Progress

According to international standards,China has entered an “aging society” in the early 21 st century.The increasing absolute number and proportion would increase the social burden and caused problems such as insufficient supply of young labor force and declining labor efficiency.Under the background that economic development is increasingly relying on technological progress,it is of great practical significance to study the influence of aging on technological progress from the aspects of labor efficiency,human capital accumulation and social security investment.Starting from the economic theory and referring to relevant literatures,this thesis holds that the mechanism of aging on technological progress can be summarized into three types,including aging burden effect,human capital effect and labor efficiency effect.And they are mainly reflected that the increase of the aging population leads to a significant increase in the expenditure on providing for the aged,crowding out R&D expenditure,thus affecting technological progress,which is the “aging burden” effect,also known as the “input effect”;There are differences between the old employees and the young ones in skills mastery and their own functions.According to the theory of human capital,the structure of human capital will be changed and then affect technological progress,which is the “human capital” effect;The effect of “labor efficiency” refers to the decline of labor efficiency caused by the change of the age structure of employees in enterprises,and enterprises adopt updated technology and on-the-job training to improve labor efficiency,thus promoting technological innovation and progress through this forced mechanism.On the basis of theoretical mechanism analysis,this thesis collects the input-output data of297 prefecture-level cities and above from 2018 to 2020,uses DEA-Malmquist method to measure TFP growth rate,decomposes the technological progress index as the explained variable,and takes old-age dependency ratio as the explained variable,and selects the fixed effect model to analyze the effect of aging on technological progress as a whole and by sub-effects.The measurement results showed a negative impact.In addition,the increase of the aged population will significantly hinder technological progress through the aging burden effect,but it will promote technological progress through the change of labor efficiency and the effect of human capital.Finally,through the heterogeneity analysis of the samples,it is found that the negative effect of population aging on technological progress in central and Western China is greater than that in eastern China.Based on the research conclusion,this thesis puts forward feasible suggestions on how to reduce the negative impact to promote economic development from the aspects of aging industry construction,talent quality improvement and macro-control.