IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cor/louvrp/2926.html

Optimal fertility under age-dependent labour productivity

Author

Listed:
  • Pierre Pestieau
  • Gregory Ponthiere

Abstract

In the so-called Rapport Sauvy (1962), the French demographer Alfred Sauvy argued that Wallonia's fertility rate was socially suboptimal, and recommended a 20 % rise of fertility, on the grounds that a society with too low a fertility leads to a low-productive economy composed of old workers having old ideas. This paper examines how Sauvy's intuition can be incorporated in the Samuelsonian optimal fertility model (Samuelson, Int Econ Rev 16:531–538, 1975). We build a four-period OLG model with physical capital and with two generations of workers (young and old), the skills of the latter being subject to some form of decay. We characterize the optimal fertility rate and show that this equalizes, at the margin, the sum of the capital dilution effect (Solow effect) and the labour age-composition effect (Sauvy effect) with the intergenerational redistribution effect (Samuelson effect). Numerical simulations show that it is hard, from a quantitative perspective, to reconcile Sauvy's recommendation with facts. This leads us to examine other potential determinants of optimal fertility, by introducing technological progress and a more general social welfare function.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Pierre Pestieau & Gregory Ponthiere, 2017. "Optimal fertility under age-dependent labour productivity," LIDAM Reprints CORE 2926, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cor:louvrp:2926
    Note: In : Journal of Population Economics, 30, 621-646, 2017
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gori, Luca & Manfredi, Piero & Sodini, Mauro, 2021. "A Parsimonious Model Of Longevity, Fertility, Hiv Transmission And Development," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 25(5), pages 1155-1174, July.
    2. Momota, Akira & Sakagami, Tomoya & Shibata, Akihisa, 2019. "Reexamination of the Serendipity Theorem from the stability viewpoint," Journal of Demographic Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 85(1), pages 43-70, March.
    3. Gregory Ponthiere, 2020. "A theory of reverse retirement," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 22(5), pages 1618-1659, September.
    4. Thomas Davoine, 2026. "Cross‐country differences in the long‐run economic impacts of increased fertility," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 128(1), pages 104-151, January.
    5. Shiyu Li & Shuanglin Lin, 2024. "Social security reforms, capital accumulation, and welfare: A notional defined contribution system vs a modified PAYG system," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 37(1), pages 1-34, March.
    6. Kazutoshi Miyazawa, 2021. "Elderly empowerment, fertility, and public pensions," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 28(4), pages 941-964, August.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E13 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - Neoclassical
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • H13 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Economics of Eminent Domain; Expropriation; Nationalization
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cor:louvrp:2926. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alain GILLIS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/coreebe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.