人口稀释效应对经济增长异质性的影响——基于人力资本积累、R&D传导的机理分析

将人口增长“稀释效应”嵌入一个四部门水平创新框架,提出一个同时内生化个体经济行为、R&D技术进步与人力资本积累的内生增长模型,推导并刻画了经济收敛于BGP均衡及影响经济增长率的因素,为解释人口增长对经济增长产生不确定影响的“正负符号之争”提供了微观基础分析。边际贡献在于:修正设定知识积累存在非规模效应且人力资本积累存在“稀释效应”,放宽对参数的上限或正负进行先验设定。得出结论:人口增长产生负向“稀释效应”与正向“思想效应”是影响经济增长的微观传导路径,正负效应共同作用门槛值大小的不同决定人口增长与经济增长呈非单调异质性不确定影响,进一步分析了稀释效应与门槛值之间的内在关联,数值模拟量化了参数效应。     

人口老龄化、人口增长与经济增长——来自中国省际面板数据的实证证据

利用一个包含人力资本的柯布-道格拉斯生产函数,从索洛增长理论入手,分析人口老龄化和人口增长率对经济增长的影响,理论模型的推理结果表明人口老龄化和人口增长对经济增长均产生不利影响。再根据理论模型的结果构造了人口老龄化和人口增长影响经济增长的实证模型,收集和使用中国1990～2008年的省级面板数据对理论模型的推理结果进行实证检验,证实了理论模型的推理结果。实证研究还表明:(1)初始的人均GDP对经济增长的影响为负,说明中国的区域经济发展出现了条件收敛的情形;(2)人力资本投资、储蓄率和劳动参与率对经济增长有着显著的正向促进作用。     

Alvin Hansen on Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth

The driving forces of economic growth, according to the mainstream of classical economic thinking, are threefold: technological innovations, the opening up of new territories and discovery of new resources, and increase in population. In interaction, in an entrepreneurial market economy, these forces generate growth not only in the aggregate but also per capita. Evidence of their power was seen in the long stretch of rising living standards in the West over the nineteenth century, despite the ups and downs of the business cycle. However, the economic experience of the interwar years, and in particular the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggested that the forces were largely spent and hence that future economic prospects were gravely imperiled. The Keynesian revolution in economics was a response to the evident malfunctioning of the capitalist economic system, although the policy recipes it offered (for increasing demand and investment to levels capable of generating an equilibrium consistent with full employment of productive resources, especially labor) by no means commanded unanimity. The most prominent American contributor to and spokesman for the new line of economic analysis—often called “the American Keynes”—was Alvin H. Hansen (1887–1975), who took up his professorship of political economy at Harvard in 1937, just after the appearance of Keynes's General Theory. In that post, which he held until his retirement in 1956, he was one of the most influential economists of the era as a theorist, policy adviser, and teacher. Hansen interpreted the economic problems of the 1930s not just as the manifestation of a particularly sharp cyclical downturn, but as evidence of secular stagnation caused by the closing of the economic frontier, sluggishness in technological innovation, and, not least, “a drastic decline in population growth.” This “stagnation thesis” is most succinctly set out in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, delivered in Detroit, 28 December 1938, under the title Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth. The address is re‐produced below from the March 1939 issue of the American Economic Review. (The opening paragraphs of the address, and two paragraphs, immediately preceding the closing paragraph, in which Hansen discusses changes in US national income in the 1930s, have been omitted.) Hansen's analysis of the effects of declining population growth in many ways echoes the thesis set out by Keynes in his seminal Galton Lecture delivered to the Eugenics Society in 1937 (reprinted in the Archives section of PDR 4, no. 3): a demographic slowdown decreases opportunities for profitable investments and increases levels of attempted saving, hence pushes the economy toward a low‐growth equilibrium at which resources are underutilized and unemployment is high. Hansen puts special emphasis on demographically induced shifts in the composition of output. He suggests that, beyond its direct positive effect on investment and output, population growth also has an indirect enhancing effect on these factors by facilitating technological progress–contrary to the “older Malthusian view.” In his policy proposals Hansen was more interventionist than Keynes, advocating a more intrusive government role in the economy as a possible means of escaping the vicious cycle of low demand and high unemployment. As to government action to reverse demographic trends seen as deleterious, neither Keynes nor Hansen argued for policies to increase fertility, presumably because they saw them as both inappropriate and, in comparison to remedial economic policy measures, inefficient or unfeasible. The demands of the war economy in the years following Hansen's address took care of the employment problem, and the immediate postwar decades brought the stimuli of pent‐up consumer demand, an outpouring of technological innovations, a reopening of the economic frontier produced by a more liberal trade regime, and, also, an acceleration of population growth. The result was rapid overall economic growth and increasing levels of per capita income. Keynesian demand management played some role in this economic success story: by the end of the 1960s even US President Richard Nixon pronounced himself a Keynesian. But it offered no remedy for the stagflation that eventually followed. The growth‐promoting recipes favored in the last decades of the century (especially in the most successful developing economies) were anything but Keynesian: limited government, fiscal restraint, and globalization. Yet recent and anticipated demographic trends, especially in Europe—notably fertility decline and population aging—make Hansen, once again, interesting reading. Commitments of the modern welfare state for health care, retirement pensions, and job security command wide approval, but they have boosted governments' weight in the economy and made labor markets inflexible, unemployment high, and retirement early—developments that may increasingly impose a brake on economic growth and on improvements of living standards. Reform measures to ease these burdens are, in principle, straightforward, but their immediate social costs are heavy and their rewards are delayed, hence resistance to reform is strong and growing. This is likely to stimulate the search for alternative policies that offer politically more palatable tradeoffs—some of which may turn out to have an unmistakably Hansenian flavor. As to future population trends, Hansen, despite his reference to a “drastic decline in population growth” based on a comparison of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Western demographic change, envisaged a convergence to a stationary population or a tendency toward very slow decrease. Yet some economies are already locked into a demographic pattern that augurs sharper declines and more rapid population aging, enhancing the relevance of the issues posed by Hansen. In Germany, for example, in the absence of immigration, the population between ages 20 and 40 will decline from 21.6 million in 2005 to 16.3 million in 2025—a drop of 23 percent. Over the same time period, the population aged 60 and older will grow from 20.5 million to 25.8 million—an increase of 26 percent. Serious efforts to slow population decline and retard population aging by stimulating fertility would of course add another major burden to government budgets.     

August Lösch on Population and Business Cycles

The German economist August Losch (1906–45) earned a permanent place in the history of economic ideas through his work on general equilibrium theory applied to a spatially distributed economy. His pathbreaking contribution in that field is synthesized in The Economics of Location (English translation 1954, first edition Die raumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft, published in 1939). Lb'sch's early theoretical and empirical work, however, was focused on the interaction of demographic and economic change, in particular the effect of population on economic fluctuations—in traditional terminology, the business cycle. His statistical investigations of the preindustrial era, reaching back to the seventeenth century, indicated that the dominant causal relationship went from the economy to population, a connection that much subsequent work also confirms. But his research on the history of German economic development under capitalist conditions showed primarily a reverse set of influences at work: from population, in particular from fluctuations in the rate of population growth, to the business cycle. This theoretical and empirical contribution, first published in German in 1936, is most accessible to readers of English in a paper presented in December of the same year at the annual meeting of the Econometric Society in Chicago and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in August 1937 under the title “Population cycles as a cause of business cycles.” Excerpts from this article—the opening paragraphs and the closing section titled “Explanation”—are reproduced below. Losch sees the relationship as mediated by changes in labor supply and consequent responses in building activity, demand for consumer goods, and, in particular, stimulus or else depressing influence on the capital goods industries as the rate of population growth increases or falls. He cautions that his empirical work supporting his proposition was limited to Germany and may not apply everywhere. He suggests, however, that the effect of immigration on the United States economy is probably congruent with the thesis.     

中国人口转变、人口红利与经济增长的实证

我国人口年龄结构的变动使得劳动负担逐渐下降,这对于储蓄水平的上升和劳动力投入效率的提高具有显著的促进作用;我国劳动负担比与经济增长呈现出明显的负相关,劳动负担比每下降1个百分点,经济增长将提高1.06个百分点,在过去的30年里劳动负担降低累计带来的经济增长占总增长的27.23%。通过计量检验证明人口年龄结构变动所产生的促进经济增长的人口红利是存在的。由此我们推断,由于未来的人口年龄结构变动趋向人口老龄化,劳动负担逐步上升,这将会对未来的经济增长造成制约。利用未来10～20年时间较轻的劳动负担的机遇期,我们应当建立良好的教育、人力资本投资、社会保障等方面的制度以及制定积极的人口政策,调整当前生育政策、适时执行宏观经济政策(劳动就业政策)来应对已发生的、正在进行的人口变动,使我国的经济继续保持强有力的增长态势。     

美国老年人口变动特征及其影响分析

虽然近10来年美国老年人口的增势减缓,但随着"婴儿潮"人口逐渐进入老龄阶段,美国老年人口问题将渐趋突出,势必影响美国社会经济乃至政治各个层面,使社会福利制度面临更大的挑战。我国人口变动的某些特征与美国有相似之处,美国政府应对人口老龄化的措施对我国有一定的借鉴意义。     

Human capital,technological progress and the demographic transition*

We emphasize the importance to consider components of population growth — fertility and mortality ‐ separately, when modeling the mutual interaction between population and economic growth. Our model implies that two countries with the same population growth will not converge towards the same level of per capita income. The country with the lower level of birth and death rates will be better off in the long run. Introducing a spill over effect of average human capital on total productivity our model implies multiple equilibria as illustrated in Becker el al. (1990) and Strulik (1999). Besides the existence of a low and high level equilibrium ‐ as characterized by low and high levels of per capita output respectively ‐ we show the existence of multiple low level (Malthusian) equilibria. Initial conditions and parameters of technological progress and human capital investment determine whether an economy is capable to escape the low level equilibrium trap and to enjoy sustained economic growth.     

人口转变的储蓄效应和增长效应--论中国增长可持续性的人口因素

人口转变是挑战中国经济持续增长的一个重要因素.在这个过程中,个人的生命周期和代际更替之间的相互叠加,通过劳动供给、储蓄和科技进步等渠道对长期经济增长施加影响.本文分析表明,人口转变使得中国从20世纪60年代中期开始享受人口红利,并一直持续到2015年前后.为了迎接人口老龄化冲击,中国需要通过扩大就业、加快人力资本积累和建立适合于中国国情的可持续的养老保障模式三条途径来充分挖掘未来潜在的人口红利,推动中国经济持续增长.     

Mathematical investigations of the escape from the Malthusian trap

We present a simulation model that synthesizes Malthusian and Boserupian notions of the way population growth and economic development were intertwined. The non‐linear stochastic model consists of a system of equations whose dynamics culminate in an industrial revolution after hundreds of iterations. The Industrial Revolution can thus be conceptualized as a permanent “escape”; from the Malthusian trap that occurs once the economy is capable of permanently sustaining an ever growing population. We investigate the conditions for such an escape and their sensitivity to the parameters of the model. This is done in an attempt to understand why some economies might have had difficulties escaping from the Malthusian trap (in contrast to the European experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Our results show that the likelihood of an escape is sensitive to the savings rate and to the output elasticities of the two sectors of the economy. When not in a subsistence crisis, the chances that an escape will occur increase for larger values of the ratio of the savings rate to the growth rate of the population. The chances of an escape also increase substantially for larger values of the output elasticities of labor.     

Age structure,education, and the transmission of technical change

The significance of deviations from exponential population growth to economic development requires the construction of growth models that explicitly recognize demographic forces as a potential source of nonstationarities. This paper uses an overlapping generations approach to analyze the impact of population aging on technological innovations in the production process. Specifically, it is assumed that a newly invented technology can be used only if the production unit engages human labor that has been trained for this task (labor-embodied technical change). In a model of overlapping generations 1-sector optimal growth, there are 3 basic components: population, education and labor, and production and investment. An individual who has been in school continuously from the time of birth embodies, according to this model, the most up-to-date form of human capital. When the population growth rate is high, technological innovations are achieved largely through the constant influx of recently educated young people into the labor force. However, when population declines lead to a slowing down of this influx, increased adult education is necessary to stimulate the continued introduction of innovations into the productive process. The form of the optimality conditions, the comparative statistics properties, and the form of the nonstationary optimal economic growth path in this model are similar to those in the Van Imhoff model of homogeneous human capital.     

人口老龄化对企业出口国内增加值率的影响研究

中国经济正面临出口国内增加值率偏低和人口老龄化的双向挑战。基于2000~2013年中国微观企业数据,文章研究了人口老龄化对企业出口国内增加值率的影响。结果显示,人口老龄化会负向影响中国企业出口国内增加值率,且在克服内生性问题、进行多种稳健性检验后,这一结论依然成立。同时,这种负向影响主要是由进口中间品对国内中间品及劳动力的替代所导致的,而人口老龄化的成本效应对出口国内增加值率的不利影响相对较小,并且从贸易结构变动来看,人口老龄化并未通过降低企业从事加工贸易的比重,进而获得总体企业平均出口国内增加值率的“被动”提升。进一步研究还表明上述负向影响在混合贸易企业、劳动密集型企业、外资企业与人口净流出地区企业上体现得更为明显。     

R&D, human capital, fertility, and growth

This paper analyzes how the decisions of individuals to have children and acquire skills affect long-term growth. We investigate a model in which technical progress, human capital, and population arise endogenously. In such an economy, the presence of distortions (such as monopolistic competition, knowledge spillover, and duplication effects) leads the decentralized long-run growth to be either insufficient or excessive. We show that this result depends on the relative contribution of population and human capital in the determination of long-term growth, i.e., on how the distortions affect the trade-off between the quantity of offsprings and the quality of the family members.     

人口老龄化的经济效应研究综述

面对高速而来的老龄化时代，国内外学者分别从社会经济各个方面研究了人口老龄化的影响，其中关于人口老龄化对经济增长的影响尤为显著。本文以经济增长中各要素贡献度的大小为依据，从储蓄、劳动生产率、人力资本等几个方面入手。对这一领域的研究进展进行概括，并总结了其中的焦点与分歧问题。     

基于C-C-E链的人才集聚对经济增长的贡献测度

以人才资本作为桥梁,遵循“人才集聚—人才资本—经济增长”（ C?C?E）的人才经济价值转化链,将人才集聚对地方经济增长的贡献进行测度。以1982－2013年北京、上海、广州的数据为基础,计算人才集聚度,并计算各地区人才资本存量,采用扩展柯布－道格拉斯生产函数计算各地区人才资本对经济增长的贡献率。研究结果表明：北京、上海、广州的平均人才集聚度分别为17.64％、12.28％、10.59％,其人才资本贡献率依次为36.46％,61.28％,38.49％。可见,人才集聚与人才贡献率并未呈现严格的正向变动。最后对此给出了解释,并提出了相应政策建议。     

Population growth overshooting and trade in developing countries

This paper examines a developing economy using a family-optimization model in which the number of children is a normal good. Trade liberalization generates two effects: the income effect that increases population growth and the gender wage effect that, in the short run, increases, but, in the long run, decreases population growth. With higher income, families invest more in capital if the status of the capital is significant. Because female labor is complementary to capital, higher investment increases the relative wages of women and attracts them from child rearing into production. Ultimately, the population growth falls below the original level.      

J. R. Hicks on the Economics of Population

Sir John Hicks (1904–89), professor of political economy at Oxford University from 1952 to 1965, was one of the foremost economists of his time, making notable contributions to the theory of wages, general equilibrium theory, and welfare economics. He received (jointly with Kenneth Arrow) the 1972 Nobel prize in economics. Value and Capital (1939), his best-known book, is held as a classic; his 1937 exegesis of Keynes's General Theory has long been a staple of undergraduate economics. Population does not figure appreciably in his writings, although an almost offhand footnote attached to the concluding paragraph of Value and Capital suggests that it could have: “[0]ne cannot repress the thought that perhaps the whole Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years has been nothing else but a vast secular boom, largely induced by the unparalleled rise in population.” (He added: “If this is so, it would help to explain why, as the wisest hold, it has been such a disappointing episode in human history.”) In his late work, A Theory of Economic History (1969), however, the principal driving force in economic development is depicted as the expansion of markets. A sustained discussion of the topic of population by Hicks is contained in one of his earlier books. The Social Framework: An Introduction to Economics (Oxford University Press, 1942). Chapters 4 and 5 of this book treat “Population and Its History” and “The Economics of Population”; one of the appendixes is “On the Idea of an Optimum Population.” Chapter 5 and this appendix are reprinted below. The Social Framework was written as an introductory text, although its lucid style characterized all of Hicks's work. It covered both theory and applications with particular attention to the then novel subject of national accounting. Hicks described the book as “economic anatomy” in contrast to the “economic physiology” of how the economy works. Chapter 5 gives equal attention to under- and overpopulation, both seen as posing dangers. The Preface to the 1971 (fourth) edition of The Social Framework notes that the population and labor force chapters “have been rather substantially altered—to take account of the curious things that have happened in these fields (which one might have expected to be slow moving).” In 1971 he is more cautious than in 1942 about suggesting that slowing population growth might have been a factor in the 1930s depression, and readier to admit of countries where “a continuing rise in population, even while there is some continuing agricultural improvement, is likely to lead in the end to unemployment and destitution.” The appendix on optimum population was retained through all editions.     

Is the Demographic Dividend an Education Dividend?

The effect of changes in age structure on economic growth has been widely studied in the demography and population economics literature. The beneficial effect of changes in age structure after a decrease in fertility has become known as the “demographic dividend.” In this article, we reassess the empirical evidence on the associations among economic growth, changes in age structure, labor force participation, and educational attainment. Using a global panel of countries, we find that after the effect of human capital dynamics is controlled for, no evidence exists that changes in age structure affect labor productivity. Our results imply that improvements in educational attainment are the key to explaining productivity and income growth and that a substantial portion of the demographic dividend is an education dividend.     

Neoclassical growth with endogenous age distribution. Poverty vs low-fertility traps as steady states of demographic transitions

Compared to other factors, the role of the age distribution of the population as a key endogenous determinant of economic growth trajectories has traditionally been overlooked. This is unrealistic, especially when dealing with major epochs of structural change, such as demographic transitions. We set up a model combining a simple representation of the economy, based on the neoclassical growth model of Solow, with a comprehensive representation of population dynamics. The model is used to investigate the structure of balanced growth states of the population and the economy in the presence of demographic transitions. The analysis shows that proper inclusion of age structure enriches the spectrum of the long-run equilibria of the neoclassical model, allowing up to five states of balanced growth, and shows the onset of “poverty” and “low-fertility” traps as different facets of fertility transitions. The role of different timing of fertility, mortality and savings transitions, and of more realistic demography of capital, is also considered.     

Social Development Trends in Europe, 1970–1994: Development Prospects for the New Europe

The European region is undergoing dramatic social change. Among other regional and international forces, these changes are rooted in: the collapse of the former Soviet Union; the sudden appearance of a large number of “new” – mostly poor and politically unstable – European nations; and, the emergence of economic trading blocs in North America and Asia. At the same time, the majority of “established” European nations are experiencing sluggish rates of economic growth, moderate to high levels of inflation, high unemployment, escalating demands on public social services, and low fertility in combination with high rates of population aging and immigration from developing countries. Despite the seriousness of the dilemmas confronting the region, European development accomplishments of the past 25 years suggest that the region's leaders already possesses the resources required to solve its complex, social, political, and economic challenges.     

数字经济时代资本三大构成变化及其对劳动报酬占比的影响

近年来,在以互联网、大数据、人工智能为核心生产要素和以创新驱动为战略支撑的数字经济逐步上升为国家战略的过程中,中国经济增长和劳动生产率提高颇为显著,资本技术构成始终保持稳步上升,而资本有机构成与资本价值构成出现了新的变化,均呈现波动式下降。劳动报酬占比在国民收入分配格局中长期处于低水平稳定且增长缓慢状态,如何提高劳动报酬占比越来越成为经济高质量发展的瓶颈。理论分析资本三大构成与劳动报酬占比的关系,并在此基础上就数字经济时代我国资本三大构成新变化对劳动报酬占比的影响进行研究发现,资本技术构成受到劳动生产率与就业数量的影响进而影响劳动报酬占比;资本价值构成对劳动报酬占比的影响与工资水平密切相关;资本有机构成随着经济发展水平的变化对劳动报酬占比的影响也会出现差异,因此需在提高劳动生产率的同时结合三大产业吸纳就业的特征,制定精准的差异化就业政策;形成中间大两头小的橄榄型分配结构,扩大中等收入群体比重并增加低收入群体报酬;探索物质生产资料和精神生产资料"双重"所有制结构变革,结合资本有机构成变化特点合理分配劳动与资本两要素;促进公共服务均等化,加大普惠性人力资本投入,在经济高质量发展中促进共同富...