{"id":784471,"date":"2026-07-07T09:14:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T09:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/784471\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T09:14:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T09:14:26","slug":"economies-thrive-with-older-smaller-population-new-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/784471\/","title":{"rendered":"Economies thrive with older, smaller population, new study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts – Declining birth rates around the world have gotten many people worried about the economic impact<\/a>, with predictions of slower growth and less innovation.<\/p>\n

But a new paper finds that the opposite may be true. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Ageing and shrinking populations have historically raised an economy\u2019s output per worker and had no damping effect on overall gross domestic product, according to a new study by Daron Acemoglu \u2013 who won the Nobel economics prize in 2024 \u2013 David Autor, Keelan Beirne and Andrew Scott.<\/p>\n

It finds that workers and companies turn to technology to augment a reduced labour force, raising the productivity of each worker.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOur findings challenge the prevailing pessimism: lower birth rates, and the ageing and shrinking populations they have produced, have raised rather than lowered GDP per \u2018worker,\u2019\u201d the authors write in a paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research.<\/p>\n

That gain \u201chas been large enough to fully offset the negative effect of population decline, leaving aggregate GDP broadly unaffected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Birth rates have declined in all continents over the past 70 years.<\/p>\n

Globally, the rate has fallen from 3.78 per 100 people in 1950 to 1.71 in 2025, according to the paper.<\/p>\n

But each percentage-point drop led to a 26.8 per cent increase in GDP per worker.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn cross-country data, declining birth rates lead to higher total factor productivity, larger capital stocks, a shift toward exports in high-tech industries, and more labour-saving patenting,\u201d the authors write.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the US, the result has been a shift of workers toward high-tech industries and an increase in patents of labour-saving inventions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is this technological response that produces the positive relationship between baby busts and subsequent growth booms,\u201d the authors argue.<\/p>\n

They examined other possible ways that lower birth rates could drive higher productivity \u2013 by enabling more women to work, or facilitating a transition from agriculture to manufacturing \u2013 but found no evidence that they had a significant effect.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Acemoglu and Autor are economics professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Beirne is a doctoral student in economics there and Scott is an economics professor at the London Business School.\u00a0BLOOMBERG<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts – Declining birth rates around the world have gotten many people worried about the economic impact,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":784472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,63,99,164],"class_list":["post-784471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/784472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}