Demographic Change, Economic Growth, and Poverty Reduction:

New Methods

David Canning

Harvard School of Public Health

November 2, 2006

Macro Causality: New Methods

• Causality from fertility, to age structure, labor supply, human capital, saving, and economic growth

• Methods– More case studies of family planning interventions

(Ireland, Iran, China).– Policy Instruments for fertility, abortion and

contraception laws and policies (micro for regression discontinuity).

– Micro + Macro (cross national micro data).– Dynamic general equilibrium model – adding up

the microeconomic effects

Interaction with policy

• Realizing the demographic dividend depends on the policy environment.

• New methods:– Better measures of policy and institutions –

particularly for labor markets and savings.– Focus on unemployment /underemployment– Old issue of labor market crowding and

wages.– Use of sub-national data gives more policy

coherence (India, China, USA).

Poverty

• Effect of fertility on poverty

• Methods – Improved cross country poverty data.– use different “poverty” measure such

as education Gini.– go to micro data to look at poverty.