| Since the reform and opening up, China’s growth performance has made it a major economic power in the world. China surpassed Japan in terms of GDP, making the Chinese economy the world’s second largest in 2010. But in the quality of economic growth and in the standard of living, there is still a long distance from China to developed counties. In the crucial period of economic transition, China’s economic growth has obvious structural problems, one of the prominent questions is China’s economic growth is mainly relying on investment and exports and consumption demand is continued bleakness. With the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, China’s economy face plenty of outside pressure, changing the growth patterns and expanding domestic demand are on the most important position. Therefore, ‘we should speed up the creation of a new growth model and ensure that development is based on improved quality and performance. This will make economic development driven more by domestic demand, especially consumer demand’ was stated clearly in 18 the CPC National Congress.China’s demographic structure has changed significantly with her 30 years of rapid economic growth. The birthrate has been decreasing; working-age population has flattened out; and the ageing pace is fast. The working-age population between 15 and 59 years of age was about 919.54 million in 2013, 11.73 million less than last year. It has decreased two years in row. The percentage of population between 15 and 64 years in China began to decrease in 2011. In 2013, the population between 15 and 64 years of the whole decreased to 72.8%, and the population over 65 years old of the whole increased to 9.7%. China will not only stay on the first most populous country, but also be one of the world’s most ageing populous and rapidly ageing societies with her fast change in demographic structure and high population. Is the evolution in quantity and structure of population the important factor influencing the residents’ consumption? How to achieve successful transformation as far as economy growing smoothly? How to expand domestic demand and stimulate residents’ consumption against a background of significant change in demographic structure? These are the challenges we will occupy to improve residents’ welfare level and to implement government’s macro-control. China’s special demographic structure and consumption presents make the research of the effects of population age structure on the residents’ consumption more necessary.In fact, the economic behaviors of population groups of different ages are ‘heterogeneous’. The consumption are significantly different between the junior, senior population group and work force. The variations of age structure will surely pass on to consumption demand through a series of intermediate factors. The impacts of these variations are multi-dimensional, and on different aspects and levels, including social impacts and economic impacts. But the study on the relationship between China’s age structure and residents’ consumption are still limited in the aspects of comprehensive and systematic. So the thorough analysis on the consumption effects of the age structure variation and the conducting mechanism between them is necessary. To realize China’s economic growth pattern from investment-oriented and export-oriented to consumption-oriented, maintain healthy and stable development of China’s economy and improve national welfare, the research has important policy implications.Therefore, this thesis put emphasis on researching the age structure variation and the effects on residents’ consumption brought by it. The research is composed of the following parts: 1. Establish the conducting mechanism between population age structure variation and residents’ growth—the effects from changes in fertility rate, the effects from changes in working-age population and the effects from ageing. 2. Establish the macro and micro analysis framework on population age structure and residents’ consumption. On the one hand, we build pseudo panel data on a micro scale to analyze the influence of age structure variation on consumption level, consumption structure and consumption gap, on the other hand, we build provincial panel data on a macro scale using panel quantile regression model and spatial panel model to analyze the influence of age structure variation on consumption structure and consumption gap. 3. Putting forward the strategy and policy suggestions about using age structure to promote the residents’ consumption including ‘the advantages of age structure exploitation strategy’ and ‘the replacement and transition strategy on the diminishing of the advantages of age structure exploitation’. The whole thesis includes 7 chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction. This part introduces the background of the subject and significance of the study. It also illustrates the content and the framework of the research. Then we put forward the innovation points and subsequent research work prospects.Chapter 2 is about the theoretical basis and literature review. This chapter firstly reviews the population transition theory, life cycle theory, household savings demand model, overlapping generation model. Then we analysis the conducting mechanism of the effect of age structure variation on consumption revolving around ageing,changes in fertility rate, and changes in working-age population. Finally, we introduce systematically about related researches at home and abroad. In order to provide the basis and support for the deep analysis later in this article, we also give comment on these literatures.Chapter 3 describes the changes of China’s population structure and residents’ consumption. We illustrate China’s population structure revolving around the history of population development, the characters of demographic transition, and we describe about consumption demand, consumption structure, and consumption gap of urban and rural residents’ consumption. The conclusions are:(1)China’s demographic transition completed rapidly in the influence of ‘family planning policies’, the demographic development has entered in the period of low birth rates, low death rates and low natural growth rates. China became an ageing society in 2000, and the ageing has some characters such as the scale is large, the speed is high, the region gap is huge and ageing before affluence.(2)The level of China’s resident’s consumption is low, the growth rate of residents’ consumption is lower than that of economy, and the propensity to consume is getting hitched, consumer demand is weak. The consumption structure is optimized and upgraded. The consumption gap within urban residents, rural residents, and the gap between urban and rural residents are still very big.Chapter 4 is population age distribution and residents’ consumption. First, we introduce the method of cohort analysis and process theoretical analysis. Then we build pseudo panel data and use data from CSS in year of 2006, 2008, and 2010 to study the influence of age variations and cohort variations to residents’ consumption by decomposing the consumption into age effect and cohort effect. Finally, we discuss whether there are differences in age effect between different levels of retirement security by introducing retirement security facts. The results show that:(1) With respect to the change of residents’ consumption, the age effects is ‘hump shaped’, and the peak occurs at the age of 45-50, China’s residents’ consumption is not in line with Life-cycle Hypothesis. The result lies in that China’s residents’ consumption retain its own characters and rules, China’s residents have rigid requirements within a specified age of time because of traditional culture and basic condition in our country. Therefore, China’s residents can’t smooth the consumption throughout their lives.(2) The cohort effect is not significant, and those people born in year from 1957 to 1965 have the lowest consumption level.(3) The fact of retirement security has significant influence on age effect, but there exist obvious difference between urban and rural region. To urban residents, retirement security shows ‘assets displacement effect’, but shows ‘leading retirement effect’ to rural residents.(4) Other facts, such as improvement in income, wealth and education will benefit consumption.Chapter 5 is population age structure and consumption structure. Firstly, we build a theoretical framework about consumption structure to explore the effect of population age structure to consumption structure theoretically. Then we use data from CSS to estimate the age effect of consumption structure and study the influence of demographic structure in house in the eyes of micro. Finally, based on the macro perspective, we introduce young burden and old burden into the model, and study the effect of population age structure to consumption structure on the division of urban and rural. In micro estimations, we find that the age effect of consumption structure is significant and urban and rural areas exhibit the same, and in general, the effect of young burden is weak, but the effect of the proportion of the elderly population is complex and there are differences between urban and rural areas. The macro results show that, in urban residents, the increase of young burden raise the proportion of survival consumption but only in those families whose income level are high, old burden has positive effect on the proportion of survival consumption, and the richer families are, the less influence of number of children on development consumption, at the same time, the aggravation of old burden decrease the proportion of development consumption in pool families. The macro results also show that, in rural residents, the pooler families are, the more significant negative influence of old burden on survival consumption. Old burden has positive effect on enjoyment consumption by affecting health care expenditure, and the richer families are, the less influence of old burden on enjoyment consumption.Chapter 6 is population age structure and consumption gap. On the base of building a statistical framework, we study the influence of population age structure on consumption gap in eyes of macro and micro. At the micro level, we decompose the age effect and cohort effect of consumption gap on the division of urban and rural at first. Then based on improving the existing method and putting the factor analysis into research, we decompose the consumption gap variation into ageing effect, cohort effect and age-between effect and compare the effects came from facts such as education, retirement security etc. The results of decomposition show that the consumption gap in urban residents is expanded when age increasing and the gap of old people is bigger than that of young’s. At the macro level, considering there are dependence and relationships between different regions, we select spatial panel data model to process empirical analysis. We obtain some results consist with micro study: ageing can expand the consumption gap. We also find that inequality in education will expand the consumption gap, but retirement security is a good measure to reduce the consumption gap.Chapter 7 is conclusion and policy recommendations. Based on the results this thesis obtain, we put forward the policy suggestions about using age structure to promote residents’ consumption and expand domestic demand, including ‘the advantages of age structure exploitation strategy’ and ‘the replacement and transition strategy on the diminishing of the advantages of age structure exploitation’.The innovation of this paper is mainly reflected in the following three aspects:Firstly, by inducting population age structure into the paper, we process a comprehensive and systemic study about the effects of age structure on consumption level, consumption structure and consumption gap based on the theory of consumption and the background of ageing and weak consumer demand. The paper builds a complete analysis framework and combines statistics, population economics and consumption economics together to make a very commendable attempt in interdisciplinary study.Secondly, this paper uses various kinds of macro and micro data to explore the influence of age structure on residents’ consumption more deeply, more completely and more accurately, so that the results come from different data complement each other, authenticate mutually. This can avoid the defects caused by focus on macro data but lack of micro data analysis.Thirdly, this paper constructs pseudo panel data applies to micro investigation and process theoretical analysis on the method of cohort analysis. To enhance the accuracy of the estimations and enrich the research tools, the paper use panel quantile regression model and spatial panel model in empirical analysis.
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