The Effect of Population Aging on Economic Growth, the Labor Force and Productivity

Nicole Maestas, Kathleen Mullen and David Powell

No WR-1063-1, Working Papers from RAND Corporation

Abstract: Population aging is widely assumed to have detrimental effects on economic growth yet there is little empirical evidence about the magnitude of its effects. This paper starts from the observation that many U.S. states have already experienced substantial growth in the size of their older population and much of this growth was predetermined by historical trends in fertility. We use predicted variation in the rate of population aging across U.S. states over the period 1980?2010 to estimate the economic impact of aging on state output per capita. We find that a 10% increase in the fraction of the population ages 60+ decreases the growth rate of GDP per capita by 5.5%. Two-thirds of the reduction is due to slower growth in the labor productivity of workers across the age distribution, while one-third arises from slower labor force growth. Our results imply annual GDP growth will slow by 1.2 percentage points this decade and 0.6 percentage points next decade due to population aging.

Keywords: population aging; GDP growth; demographic transitions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J11 J14 J23 J26 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55
Date: 2016-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem and nep-gro
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (125)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/working ... -1/RAND_WR1063-1.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: The Effect of Population Aging on Economic Growth, the Labor Force, and Productivity (2023)
Working Paper: The Effect of Population Aging on Economic Growth, the Labor Force and Productivity (2016)
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:ran:wpaper:wr-1063-1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from RAND Corporation Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benson Wong (repec@rand.org).