Age Structure And Economic Growth

Age structure is an important factor to affect the economic growth. From the beginning of this century, the world are facing the effects of aging population which includes both challenges and opportunities. Due to the special conditions, the aging of the population in China is faster than the same income level in developing countries. Before Chinese per capital income gets to the middle level, the aging population structure will bring more profound influence to our country. Therefore, we will do some research on the impact of the aging population on economic development.Based on demographic dividend theory, this paper summarizes the related theoretical literature and reviews the variation of population age structure. It discusses the effect of the age structure variation on economic growth and quantitative relationship between them. And it also measures economic growth path for a long future. By establishing two channels of labour supply and savings, through bi-logarithm function model and some empirical tests, it indicates contributions which dependency burden, children dependency burden and aged dependency burden have made to economic growth. Furthermore, this paper make a quantitative prediction on the contribution rate of demographic dividend to economic growth.By theoretical and empirical analysis, some basic conclusions have been got as follows:(1) Since the reform and opening-up, the lowing dependency burden brought economic growth through labour and savings. The lowing children dependency burden increases labour input and promotes economic growth, while the rising aged dependency burden suppresses the valid labour input. Moreover, compared with aged dependency burden,children dependency burden plays a more important role than in economic growth. (2) The current economic growth is enjoying the most demographic dividend. Along with the aging population, the dividend would gradually decrease. But for the next 20 years, the contribution rate of demographic dividend will remain a high level which is up to 10 percent. Therefore, our country should make full use of the demographic dividend, and maximize its contribution to the growth of economy.