Economic and Demographic Change: A Synthesis of Models, Findings, and Perspectives

Building upon recent Barro models that account for the impacts of various economic and political factors conditioning the pace of economic growth, we evaluate the merits of alternative specifications that expose the impacts of demographic change. For a sample of 89 countries, we arrive at the qualified judgment that rapid population growth exerted a fairly strong, adverse impact, on the pace of economic growth over the period 1960-1995. The positive impacts of density, size, and labor force entry were swamped by the costs of rearing children and maintaining an enlarged youth-dependency age structure.