THE IMPACT OF POPULATION AGING ON TURKEY’S ECONOMIC GROWTH: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS WITH ARDL MODEL

Abstract

Purpose - Labor and labor productivity concepts, which have an important role in growth dynamics, have found a serious research area especially in developing countries due to the population aging. Many researchers have focused on the effect of population aging on economic growth of some developed countries like China, Japan, Malaysia and those countries where the old people share are growing fast or have a large share in total population. This condition, which causes the emphasis on production factors, labor migration and factor productivity concepts, is the main motivation of this study. Methodology - In order to find the relationship between population aging and economic growth in Turkey, an ARDL model has been used for 1970-2018-time period. This time period was selected due to availability of data for selected variables. The long run and short run models are estimates by Eviews 10 software. Findings- The results illustrate that the population aging negatively affect Turkey’s economy in either short-run or long-run. Based on this model’s results, Turkey’s economy is negatively influenced by population aging 0.029 percent in long-run and 0.084 percent in short-run periods which the coefficients are significant at 0.5 and 0.1 levels respectively. Conclusion- The rates of fertility and death both have been decreasing while the rate of life expectancy has been increasing gradually during last three decades in Turkey showing a negative effect from population aging on economic growth of Turkey. These signs are associate with this study’s result.

Keywords

• Population aging
• population growth
• economic growth
• ARDL model
• Turkey

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