人口老龄化会阻碍技术创新吗?

Will population aging hinder technological innovation?

现有研究多认为人口老龄化会阻碍技术创新。随着技术创新从经验实践驱动发展为科研实验驱动,技术创新主体逐渐由农业和手工业生产者转变为专门的研发人员。在当代,研发人员的规模、年龄结构和素质水平会对国家技术创新水平带来直接影响。而在人口老龄化背景下,只要劳动年龄人口的绝对规模较大、研发人员占劳动力的比重较小,人口老龄化就不影响研发队伍的规模、年龄结构和素质水平。此外,老龄化导致的养老负担加重和员工平均工资上涨也未必会对研发资金的投入产生挤压效应。因此,人口老龄化并不必然导致国家技术创新水平的下降。国际经验和中国定量分析结果也发现,人口老龄化与技术创新之间并没有显著相关。

The relationship between population aging and technological innovation is an important issue in the new development stage.As technological innovation develops from experience-practice driven to scientific research-experiment driven,R&D personnel,as the main body of technological innovation,have gradually become a profession and will have a direct impact on the level of national technological innovation.In the context of population aging,the working age population is larger and the proportion of R&D personnel is smaller,so that the R&D team can still expand its scale,younger age structure and improve its quality level.The squeezing effect of increasing pension burden and rising average wages on R&D capital investment is not obvious.Therefore,population aging does not necessarily lead to the decline of national technological innovation level.Quantitative analysis also found that there was no significant correlation between population aging and technological innovation.