Cities of Workers, Children, or Seniors? Age Structure and Economic Growth in a Global Cross-Section of Cities

Remi Jedwab, Daniel Pereira and Mark Roberts

No 9040, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: A large literature documents the positive influence of a city's skill structure on its rate of economic growth. By contrast, the effect of a city's age structure on its economic growth has been a hitherto largely neglected area of research. This paper hypothesizes that cities with more working-age adults are likely to grow faster than cities with more children or seniors. The paper sets out the potential channels through which such differential growth may occur. Using data from a variety of historical and contemporary sources, it shows that there exists marked variation in the age structure of the world's largest cities, across cities and over time. It then studies how age structure affects economic growth for a global cross-section of mega-cities. Using various identification strategies, the analysis finds that mega-cities with higher dependency ratios, that is, with more children and/or seniors per working-age adult, grow significantly slower. Such effects are particularly pronounced for cities with high shares of children. This result appears to be driven mainly by the direct, negative effects of a higher dependency ratio on the size of the working-age population and the indirect effects on work hours and productivity for working-age adults within a city.

Keywords: Economic Growth; Industrial Economics; Economic Theory&Research; Health Care Services Industry; Educational Sciences; Reproductive Health; Family Planning Research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-10-15
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/83644157 ... ection-of-Cities.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Cities of Workers, Children or Seniors? Age Structure and Economic Growth in a Global Cross-Section of Cities (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9040

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().