人口老龄化、城市化与中国经济增长

Population Aging、Urbanization and China's Economic Growth

中国的城市化发展战略遭遇人口老龄化的挑战,而以往关于城市化的经济增长效应的国内外研究均忽视了人口老龄化的作用。基于此,可以构建一个融合发展经济学与内生经济增长理论的新分析框架,将老龄化因素纳入城乡二元经济三期世代交叠模型,探讨老龄化影响城市化与经济增长的机制。理论研究发现:(1)人口老龄化会降低城市与农村的教育投资率、降低农村的储蓄率,但同时会提高城市的储蓄率,总体来看,人口老龄化对整个二元经济增长的作用是模糊的;(2)城市化有助于提高一个国家的经济增长率并增进国民福利,但由于人口老龄化会导致农村人力资本的积累速度下降,降低农村向城市的人口迁移率,从而会减缓城市化的进程并弱化城市化的经济增长效应。此外,通过运用中国的省级面板数据验证了上述理论分析的结论。研究有助于从人口转变的视角来理解中国的城市化和经济增长的动力。

Nowadays,China's urbanization development strategy is encountered the challenge of population aging,whereas previous literatures about the relationship between economic growth and urbanization tend to ignore the effects of population aging.Based on this,the paper constructs a new analytical framework that integrates development economics with endogenous economic growth theory,and sets up a three-period overlapping generation model in an urban and rural dual economy with population aging to discuss the influence mechanisms of population aging on urbanization and economic growth.The theory analysis implies that:(1)population aging will reduce rural saving rate and education investment,which tends to reduce economic growth,but at the same time it will has an uncertain impact on the urban household savings rate and education investment.In general,the role of population aging on the dual economic growth is ambiguous,depends on the parameters setting of the model.(2)urbanization helps to improve the country's economic growth and enhance the national welfare.The population aging has a negative effect on rural human capital investment,reduce rural-to-urban migration rate,and it will slow down the process of urbanization and weaken the economic growth effect of urbanization.We also conduct an empirical study by drawing on panel data from China's 29 provinces for the period 1995-2017.The findings support our theoretical predictions.This research enriches and develops the existing theory,and helps to understand the urbanization and economic growth power of China from the perspective of population transformation.