The importance of being mature: the effect of demographic maturation on global per capita GDP

Journal of Population Economics - Tập 21 - Trang 589-608 - 2006
Rafael Gómez1, Pablo Hernández de Cos2
1London School of Economics, Department of Management, London, UK
2Banco de España, European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Tóm tắt

Given that savings behaviour and worker productivity have strong life-cycle components and given that demographic profiles vary across countries, population age structure should be linked to differences in levels of economic development. In this paper, we measure the economic importance of age structure variation for the global economy. We find that demographic maturation has been associated with nearly half of the evolution of global per capita GDP since 1960. We also find that age structure differences can account for just over half of the variation in worldwide per capita GDP (i.e. the lack of sigma convergence) observed since 1960.

Tài liệu tham khảo

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