Demographic shocks and global factor flows

How economists view the impact of demography on economic events has changed a great deal over the past decade or so. When, in the late 1980s, Allen Kelley (1988) was writing his magisterial survey on the economic consequences of population growth in the Third World, the conventional wisdom was that Malthus did not matter much. Furthermore, the focus was on aggregate population growth. Since Kelley's 1988 survey, we have learned two important lessons that should have been obvious then, but were not: First, changes in the composition of the population often matter far more than changes in population aggregates; and second, when it comes to demographic impact, we need to think about long transitions rather than equilibrium steady states. These two lessons have taught us a great deal about the connection between demographic shocks and global factor flows--and even about growth.