Aging and regional productivity growth in Germany

Autor: Eckhardt Bode, Dirk Dohse, Ulrich Stolzenburg
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: Review of Regional Research.
ISSN: 1613-9836
0173-7600
DOI: 10.1007/s10037-023-00188-3
Popis: We investigate the effects of aging on regional productivity growth, the mechanisms and the strength of which are not well-understood. We focus on two different manifestations of population aging—workforce aging and an increasing share of retirees—and investigate channels through which aging may impact on regional productivity growth for a panel of German counties 2000–2019. We find that workforce aging is more negatively associated with productivity growth in urban than in nonurban regions. A likely reason is that aging is detrimental to innovative and knowledge-intensive activities, which are heavily concentrated in cities. We also find a negative association between the share of the retired population and productivity growth in regions with a small household services sector. A likely reason is that older people’s disproportionate demand for local household services (including health care, recreation) requires a re-allocation of resources from more productive manufacturing or business services to less productive household services. Regions specialized more in highly productive industries have more to lose in this process.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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