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The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population
Abstract
In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women are having fewer than two children on average. It is a distinct possibility that global population will decline rather than stabilize in the long run. In standard models, this has profound implications: rather than continued exponential growth, living standards stagnate for a population that vanishes. Moreover, even the optimal allocation can get trapped in this outcome if there are delays in implementing optimal policy. (JEL I12, J11, J13, O41)
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“Jones (2022) goes one step further and shows that the consequences of entrenched below-replacement fertility are long-run depopulation and economic stagnation.”
From Fertility in High-Income Countries: Trends, Patterns, Determinants, and Consequences (2024) · cites this paper as Jones 2022
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Cited by
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Metadata
- Authors
- Jones, C. I.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University, Graduate School of Business and NBER (email: )
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2022-11-01
- Volume
- 112
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 3489-3527
- ISSN
- 0002-8282
- Cited by
- 196
- References
- 48
- Language
- en
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