Asymmetric population aging, the international technology gap, and global growth

Ryoji Ohdoi

No 302, Discussion Paper Series from School of Economics, Kwansei Gakuin University

Abstract: This paper studies how cross-country asymmetries in population aging shape the international technology gap and global growth. I develop a two-country, two-sector overlapping-generations model with endogenous technological progress free from scale effects. The analysis shows that, in the long-run equilibrium, faster population aging is associated with lower relative technology through two mechanisms: reduced per capita labor supply and a reallocation of employment toward the non-tradable sector. Consequently, increasing labor-force participation alone does not necessarily prevent relative technological decline, as the sectoral-reallocation channel can remain operative even when aging does not reduce per capita labor supply. Numerical comparative statics confirm these mechanisms and reveal potentially non-monotonic effects on global growth under large demographic asymmetries.

Keywords: International asymmetries in population aging; Overlapping generations; Endogenous technological progress without scale effects; Non-tradable goods; Sectoral labor reallocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F43 J11 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2025-12, Revised 2026-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dge, nep-gro, nep-lab and nep-opm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://192.218.163.163/RePEc/pdf/kgdp302.pdf Revised version, 2026 (application/pdf)

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:kgu:wpaper:302

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from School of Economics, Kwansei Gakuin University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Toshihiro Okada ().