Does Demographic Dividend Impact Economic Growth? Evidence from G-20 Countries

In the past decades, G-20 countries have witnessed heterogeneous demographic transitions, yielding diversified economic growth outcomes, and exploring this relationship between the demographic dividend and the economic growth of these countries is of global importance, given the share of G-20 members in the world economy. Along with extensive graphical examinations of the underlying annual data of G-20 countries for the period between 1995 and 2019, this study deploys the panel cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag method to probe the impact of the demographic dividend on real gross domestic product growth while comprehensively controlling for investment, trade, natural resources, financial development and government expenditure. This study finds evidence that the demographic structure, proxied by the support ratio, is an important conditional determinant of aggregate economic growth among G-20 countries, with statistically significant short-run and long-run associations in the pooled sample. JEL Codes: J11, R11, J68, O47, P42