Demographics: Appreciating Economic Growth Potential

D. Sykes Wilford and Blu Putnam

Chapter 5 in Economics Gone Astray, 2019, pp 59-67 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: Demographic patterns are one of the more important drivers of economic growth potential, ranking right up there with the type of economic system, the degree of political stability, property rights and viability of the rule of law. Economists in the 1800s paid plenty of attention to demographics. Witness the debates ignited by the economist and cleric, Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, around whether population growth might outstrip the ability of the planet to feed all the people. In the post-war era of modern economics, however, demographic patterns have often taken a back seat, at least until recently. Basic economics textbooks tend to downplay demographic patterns and macro-economic growth models may simply assume a constant age distribution of the population and steady growth of the labor force. These assumptions make for truly bad economics and very poor long-term macro-economic forecasting…

Keywords: Economics; Macroeconomics; Monetary Policy; Fiscal Policy; Inflation; Risk Management; Federal Reserve; Quantitative Easing; Taylor Rule (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E02 E44 E52 E6 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9781944659592_0005 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9781944659592_0005 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
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:wsi:wschap:9781944659592_0005

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().