Demographic Change and Economic Growth in Asia

Abstract

Trade openness, high savings rates, human capital accumulation, and macroeconomic policy only accounted for part of the 1965-1990 growth performance in East Asia. Subsequently, demographic change was shown to be a missing factor in explaining the East Asian growth premium. Since 1990, East Asia has undertaken major economic reforms in response to financial crises and other factors. We reexamine the role of the demographic transition in contributing to cross-country differences in economic growth through to 2005, with a particular focus on East Asia. We highlight the need for policy to offset potential negative effects of aging populations in the future. Copyright (c) 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2009 Japan Center for Economic Research.

An analysis of the interdependence of demographic factors, labour effort and economic growth in Ireland

“…Prskawetz et al (2007) suggests that a declining fertility rate can have a positive impact on economic growth. Bloom and Williamson (1998) identify two mechanisms through which this can occur. Both mechanisms revolve around the effect a declining fertility rate has on the ratio of working age population to total population.…”

Productivity and Unemployment Convergence in theEurozone and ASEAN: A Comparative Study Based onDemographic and Maastricht Criteria Roles

“…Applying Input Variables, the speed of convergence was increasing which implied that ASEAN conditionally converged with the speed is 25.56%. Investment and openness had positive impact and population growth had negative influence as suggested in [12] that the association between population growth and per capita growth was negative for positive effects of scale and induced innovation. Government expenditure had no influence.…”

“…Feyrer [11] indicated that the change in workforce has a strong and significant impact on the growth rate of productivity and dependency ratio has no influence on productivity. Bloom and Finlay [12] found the significant of demographic transition in East Asia growth; labor force growth has significant and positive influence on growth as so working age population and life expectancy. Bloom, et al [3], investigating the impact of demographic change on growth, found that conditional income convergence existed both in China and India, working age population has positive impact on growth and so life expectancy.…”

7.2 Demography and public health

“…It has been argued that this dividend of lower child dependency and higher representation of adults in the prime working age groups played an important part in the rapid economic development of the 'East Asian Tigers', like South Korea and also China (Bloom et al 2000). The next phase, involving high and increasing representation of older people may, it has been suggested, also bring some economic benefit in the form of increased savings (by the large number of older people) and so greater capital available for investment (Mason and Lee 2006).…”