Demographic Dynamics, Economic Growth, and the Life Cycle Hypothesis: A Methodological Study of Generalized Moments
Name: TAZZIO BOCAIUVA
Publication date: 13/03/2026
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ANTONIO RICARDO FREISLEBEM DA ROCHA | Examinador Externo |
| HENRIQUE AUGUSTO CAMPOS FERNANDEZ HOTT | Examinador Interno |
| RICARDO RAMALHETE MOREIRA | Presidente |
Summary: The interaction between product and population is one of the foundational subjects of the economical sciences. The effects of an increase in the number of people are reflected through several channels. The life-cycle hypothesis provides the theoretical basis for one of them, in the form of capital accumulation. Such hypothesis supposes that agents attempt to maintain their consumption constant for a given expected income over the course of their respective life cycles. In that case, individuals save in their productive years just enough to keep their level of consumption constant for their years of retirement. If valid, this hypothesis implies the existence of an optimum rate of population growth whilst facing the saving rate as a function of demographic variables, given that the share of this productive population is, by definition, a function of a path of population growth rates. GMM models can validate this argument by indicating that the age structure matters. For such, a set of models for a group of 40 countries from 1993 to 2023 was tested, utilizing the population growth rate, the growth rate of the share of the working-age population, the unemployed labour-force growth rate, the aggregate domestic savings rate and the real per
capita income growth rate. Results show that the existence of a population-savings-income channel in a life-cycle hypothesis style is something valid for countries of high income, indicating the existence of an optimum population growth rate, as opposed to countries of low income, in which a kind of Malthusian trap seems to operate when considering capital accumulation as the only driving force behind economic growth.
