Secular Stagnation? The Effect of Aging on Economic Growth in the Age of Automation

Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

American Economic Review, 2017, vol. 107, issue 5, 174-79

Abstract: Several recent theories emphasize the negative effects of an aging population on economic growth, either because of the lower labor force participation and productivity of older workers or because aging will create an excess of savings over desired investment, leading to secular stagnation. We show that there is no such negative relationship in the data. If anything, countries experiencing more rapid aging have grown more in recent decades. We suggest that this counterintuitive finding might reflect the more rapid adoption of automation technologies in countries undergoing more pronounced demographic changes and provide evidence and theoretical underpinnings for this argument.

JEL-codes: E23 E24 E32 J11 J14 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.p20171101
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (201)

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