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Duke Economics Working Paper #95-37

Aggregate Population and Economic Growth Correlations: The Rule of the Components of Demographic Change


Allen C. Kelley
and
Robert M. Schmidt

Abstract

The results of recent correlations showing a negative impact of population growth on economic development in cross-country data for the 1980s, versus "non-significant" correlations widely found for the 1960s and 1970s, are examined using contemporaneous and lagged components of demographic change, convergence-type economic modeling, and several statistical frameworks. The separate impacts of births and deaths are found to be notable but offsetting in the earlier periods. In contrast, the short-run costs (benefits) of births (mortality reduction) increase (decrease) significantly in the 1980s, and the favorable labor- force impacts of past births are not fully offsetting.

JEL: J1, O4

Revised and published in Demography, Vol. 32, No. 4, 1995, pp. 543-555.

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