Population Ageing and the Labour Market
Arbeitsmarkt und Demographie
Henriette Engelhardt, Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz
In einem Übersichtsartikel für ein Lehrbuch der Arbeitsmarktsoziologie werden die wechselseitigen Beziehungen von demographischen Veränderungen und Arbeitsmarktindikatoren diskutiert. Der erste Teil präsentiert zunächst die Effekte von demographischen Strukturen und Prozessen auf Lohnstruktur und Arbeitslosigkeit. Dabei werden sowohl Mikro- (z.B. altersspezifische Lohnprofile) als auch Makroansätze (Kohortengröße und Löhne) diskutiert und die Implikationen der Bevölkerungsalterung für den Arbeitsmarkt besprochen. Im zweiten Teil stellen wir unterschiedliche Modelle vor, welche Effekte arbeitsmarktrelevanter Faktoren auf die Fertilität untersuchen. Die Arbeit endet mit einem Resümee des bisherigen Standes der Forschung und einem Ausblick auf weiteren Forschungsbedarf.
Population Ageing and Economic Growth
Thomas Fent
It can be taken for granted that in the future we will face a period of dramatic population ageing. The question is how these demographic developments may affect future economic growth. Therefore we have to elaborate on the interrelationship of population shrinkage, investment, and economic development. On one hand there will be more retired people living longer than ever before, and on the other hand less people in their working ages will be available to work for the goods consumed by the retired generation. Furthermore, there will be even less people in the youngest age groups to consume education, which makes it harder to ensure the accumulation of future human capital. In this research project, the possible time path of economic development in an ageing society is discussed with an overlapping generations model incorporating the dynamics of physical capital, expenditures for education, and the population with its age structure. The age structure of the population is explicitly taken into account. It turns out that the relationship between age structure and economic growth may be highly nonlinear. Moreover, the data available from the past only cover a rather narrow scope of the spectrum. Thus, empirical studies may be misleading in terms of deriving meaningful conclusions about future scenarios of economic growth.
Population Ageing and Economic Productivity
Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz, Inga Freund
One way of measuring productivity by age is based on the analysis of employer-employee matched data-sets, where individual productivity is measured as the workers’ marginal impact on the firm’s value-added. In collaboration with Statistics Austria, the records of employees in the Austrian population census of 2001 have been linked for the first time with the respective enterprise records from the structural business survey in 2001. Analysing these data we can study how the labour composition of firms varies with the firm’s average productivity performance and investment behaviour. We can thus shed light on the question how age, education and experience interact with productivity development in different industries. While this cannot yield any direct information on how innovation is handled by an ageing work force, a descriptive picture of differences in age structure and education between innovative dynamic industries and more mature industries can certainly be achieved. By applying theoretical restrictions on age-related productivity we should be able to test whether these restrictions are accepted by the data. The main challenge in this approach is to isolate the effect of the employees’ age from the other influences on the firm’s value-added.
Workforce Ageing
Alexia Fürnkranz-Prskawetz, Thomas Fent
Population ageing currently receives high attention in economics, in particular with respect to its implications for the sustainability of social security systems such as the pension, health and elderly care system. However, population ageing will also affect the quantity and composition of the current workforce and this will in turn affect the productivity and economic performance of a population. In this project we study the sensitivity of projected economic productivity (measured by output per worker) with respect to alternative projections of the quantity and quality (measured by individual productivity) of labour supply as well as with respect to alternative assumptions on the substitutability of workers at different ages. Our simulation results indicate that the degree of substitutability between workers at different ages has a pronounced influence on projected relative productivity