The Role of Components of Demographic Change in Economic Development : Whither the Trend ?

In this paper, we investigate the role of the components of demographic change on economic development. Population growth has both positive and negative effects on income growth. Kelley and Schmidt (1995) states that high birth rates are costly in terms of growth but this effect can be offset by a positive impact of mortality reductions. We study how the weight of each effect has changed over time considering a panel of countries over the last four decades. We find that there is little gain to expect from further reductions in mortality in developing countries, and that the effect of birth rates has become positive in developed countries. In contrast to the earlier study, where growth enhancing effect of population density is felt consistently for all decades, we find that the effect is limited only to the sixties.Demographic components; endogenous growth; panel data

Age Dynamics and Economic Growth: Revisiting the Nexus in a Nonparametric Setting.

This paper explores the relationship between the growth rates of per capita income and age- structured population in a non-parametric setting. Analysis in this framework provides us with new insights about the interaction structure: significant non-linear relation between the two and interesting ’direct’ and ’feedback’ effects on growth. Nonlinearity is found to be a major source of growth fluctuations in OECD and non-OECD countries.Age dynamics, Economic growth, Non-parametric panel.

Spatial Growth Volatility and Age-structured Human Capital Dynamics in Europe.

In a semi-parametric spatial vector autoregressive setting this paper investigates the role of age-structured human capital on output comovements in Europe. Using the proportion of age-structured human capital growth and its degree of appropriations in output production as twin measures of distance, we find significant positive spatial growth volatility/persistence.Spatial growth volatility, Non-linear growth, Age-structured human capital, Semi-parametric VAR.

Stochastic environmental effects, demographic variation, and economic growth

We consider a stochastic environment to study interactions among pollution growth, demographic changes, and economic growth. Drawing on the empirical findings of slow convergence patterns of pollution shocks (viz., with a long-memory), we build an analytical framework where stochastic environmental feedback effects on population changes are reflected upon aggregate economic growth. Long-memory in economic growth, in our model, is shown to arise due to the inherent stochasticity in environmental and demographic system. Empirical results for a set of developed and developing countries generally support our conjecture. Simulation experiment is carried out to lend additional support to this claim.Environmental Quality, Long-memory, Demographic Dynamics, Economic Growth

Stochastic demographic dynamics and economic growth: an application and insights from the world data

'This research has two broad objectives: First, to model population growth in a stochastic framework such that the effects of possible non-mean convergent shocks could be studied theoretically on long-run economic growth and planning. Second, an empirical strategy for modelling stochastic population growth over time is provided. Forecasting exercise has been rigorously carried for population growth and income by embedding the stochastic growth feature of population. For modelling purpose, a long-memory mechanism for population growth is suggested so that the classical economic growth assumption of constant and/ or non-stochastic population growth in economic growth models appear as a limiting case. The analytical results show that embedding the stochastic features of population growth helps in explaining the economic growth volatility. In particular, it is found to be a formidable cause of the presence of long-memory in output. The empirical analysis shows that unless the stochastic feature of population growth is taken into empirical growth models, the author will not be able map out the significant effects of demographic variables consistently over time. It is also shown that how corroborating the information of stochastic shocks of population alters our forecast vision by impacting significantly on the precision of the estimates.' (author's abstract)

A Note on Shock Persistence in Total Factor Productivity Growth

We study implications of persistence of shocks in total factor productivity (TFP) growth under Bayesian framework for a set of African countries over the period 1970-2003. Contrary to convention, we find that stochastic unit root is present for most of the African countries and that there is time-varying dependence structure in the underlying processes. The implication of our finding is that the persistence process governing TFP series is non-linear, stationary for some period and (mildly) explosive for others pointing to the fact that linear policy rules to counteract stochastic shocks in TFP may not prove useful. The repeat of TFP cycles is traced to this behaviour.Total factor productivity persistence, stochastic unit root, time varying dependence, Bayesian mechanism, Africa