Secular Stagnation? The Effect of Aging on Economic Growth in the Age of Automation
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aer.p20171101.pdf
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Author(s)
Restrepo, Pascual
Acemoglu, K. Daron
Date Issued
May 2017
Journal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Acemoglu, Daron and Restrepo, Pascual. “Secular Stagnation? The Effect of Aging on Economic Growth in the Age of Automation.” American Economic Review 107, 5 (May 2017): 174–179 © 2017 American Economic Association
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Several recent theories emphasize the negative effects of an aging population on economic growth, either because of the lower labor force participation and productivity of older workers or because aging will create an excess of savings over desired investment, leading to secular stagnation. We show that there is no such negative relationship in the data. If anything, countries experiencing more rapid aging have grown more in recent decades. We suggest that this counterintuitive finding might reflect the more rapid adoption of automation technologies in countries undergoing more pronounced demographic changes and provide evidence and theoretical underpinnings for this argument.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/AER.P20171101
