Western mainstream economics has devoted almost all its intellectual efforts to how to improve economic growth measured by per capita GDP, and relevant policy suggestions are also looking for factors that can improve capital accumulation. Even though economists emphasize the role of human capital more and more, they study and observe the factors that improve human capital, such as education, training and health, and the role of human capital as a means and tool in economic growth, while ignoring people as the purpose of development. Therefore, although economics pays more and more attention to human capital, it is pale and powerless in practice, because it cannot find an effective way to improve the human capital stock in most developing countries. On the other hand, pure GDP growth cannot solve the problem of fairness in income distribution and the relationship among people, resources and environment. If these problems cannot be properly solved, it will be difficult to achieve sound and rapid economic growth in the end.
China's family planning policy, from directly paying attention to the relationship between people and means of production, to the coordination between people and resources and environment, and even paying more and more attention to people's all-round development, has embarked on a special road of all-round economic and social development and has become an important aspect of people-oriented Scientific Outlook on Development. For example, the first annual symposium on population work in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was raised to the level of coordinated development of population, resources and environment, which is an important symbol of the formation of Scientific Outlook on Development. Therefore, China's population policy and strategy have created a unique way for the government to put people first and accelerate the process of economic and social development with the sustainable development of population.
Judging from the role of population development in scientific development, the human development index is an important reference index. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published the first volume of the Human Development Report in 1990, which shows that the organization has seen the need for all-round economic and social development centered on people. The report integrates income level (per capita GDP calculated by purchasing power parity), health level represented by life expectancy at birth, and education level composed of adult literacy rate and gross enrollment rate, and constructs the Human Development Index (HDI), which measures human development achievements more comprehensively than the traditional pure GDP (Figure 1).
Since the early 1970s, China has carried out the family planning policy in urban and rural areas throughout the country. Its content is to advocate late marriage and late childbearing, and to have fewer and healthier children. Since then, the fertility rate in China has been greatly reduced, and the momentum of rapid population growth has been controlled. By the mid-1990s, China had completed the transition to the type of population reproduction with low birth rate and low mortality rate. Compared with developing countries with the same income level, China has realized the demographic transition earlier. The main performance is that the population has been effectively controlled and the total fertility rate has continued to decline. 197 1 year, and the national total fertility rate is 5.4. Since then, this indicator has fallen to the replacement level.
At present, the total fertility rate is about 1.8, which is far below the average level of developing countries and equivalent to the level of developed countries in the mid-1990s.
This achievement not only controlled the population, but also improved the above factors, which helped to promote the development of China. In other words, the improvement of life expectancy, education level and economic development level all reflect the achievements of population development. Figure 2 shows the improvement of China's human development index in the past 30 years. In addition, China's human development index has always been better than per capita GDP in the world, which shows the achievements of all-round economic and social development. Next, we examine the contribution of population development to economic growth, the improvement of education level and health level, and other elements that constitute the human development index.
Second, the contribution of demographic transition to economic growth.
In earlier demography and economics literature, the relationship between population and economic development mainly focused on the relationship between total population or population growth rate and economic growth rate, while the discussion on population transformation only stayed at the level of fertility rate, birth rate, mortality rate and total population. In these discussions, people have brought population development into the vision of economic development, which is an important contribution to the practice of economic development in developing countries and enriches human understanding of development. However, this understanding is not all. To some extent, the relationship between economic development and population structure is ignored. The most important result of population transformation is the change of labor supply characteristics brought about by population structure change.
As most developed countries and many newly industrialized countries and regions have successively completed the demographic transition, demographers have begun to observe the consequences of population aging brought about by this transition, so demographic changes have been brought into the research field for the first time. In addition, economists have observed the changes of the working-age population accompanied by the demographic transition, and its impact on the sources of economic growth.
During the whole period of reform and opening-up, the rapid economic growth of China was carried out under the condition of dual economy. As the main feature of the dual economic structure, the unlimited supply of labor is usually related to the demographic transition. In the process of population reproduction type changing from "high birth rate, high mortality rate and low growth rate" to "low birth rate, low mortality rate and low growth rate", due to the continuity and time difference of birth rate and mortality rate decline, three stages of population age structure change have been formed. These three stages have the characteristics of high dependency ratio of children, high proportion of working-age population and high dependency ratio of the elderly (Williamson,
1997)。 Specifically, during the time lag between the decline of mortality and the decline of birth rate, the natural growth rate of population is on the rise, and the proportion of children who need to be raised is correspondingly increased. With the decline of fertility rate, after a time difference of about 20 years, the proportion of working-age population began to rise. The further decline of fertility rate leads to the decline of population growth rate, and then the population gradually begins to age. Therefore, the natural population growth rate and the working-age population growth rate respectively rose first and then fell.
Economic growth, social development and population policy have promoted and accelerated the demographic transition in China. As the period of reform and opening up coincides with the specific stage of population transformation, the working-age population (1population aged 6-64) is large and growing. The working-age population accounts for a high proportion of the total population. On the one hand, it ensures the sufficient labor supply for economic growth; On the other hand, it means that the population burden is light and the economy is surplus, which is conducive to achieving and maintaining a high savings rate (Figure 3). Therefore, the more productive population structure provides an additional source for economic growth, the so-called demographic dividend. The resulting demographic dividend is released through the reform of resource allocation mechanism, and realized as a comparative advantage through China's participation in the process of economic globalization, thus delaying the process of diminishing return on capital and providing an additional source for economic growth.
According to the results of our econometric model, if the population dependency ratio, that is, the ratio of the population under 16 and the population over 65 to the working-age population, is used to represent this population factor, then during the reform and opening up period, the per capita GDP growth rate can be increased by 0. 1 15 percentage points for every drop in the population dependency ratio.
From 1982 to 2000, the total dependency ratio decreased by 20. 1%, which promoted the growth rate by 2.3 percentage points. During the same period, the per capita GDP growth rate was around 8.6%, of which the contribution of the decrease in dependency ratio was as follows.
26.8%, that is, due to the decline of population dependency ratio, the contribution rate of population factors to per capita GDP growth during the reform and opening up period exceeded 1/4 (Cai Wang,
2005)。 From this we can see the direct contribution of population development to the improvement of per capita income level and people's quality of life.
Third, population quality: the substitution of quantity and quality.
Human capital is an acquired skill attached to workers. Human capital is called "capital" because it also needs to be accumulated in the form of investment, which is the * * * nature of human capital and material capital; Human capital is called "manpower" because it cannot be separated from everyone it invests in. This is the difference between human capital and material capital.
The concept of human capital was first put forward by Schultz in 1960s. Since then, a large number of economists have made important contributions to the establishment and improvement of the theoretical system of human capital. When economists first put forward human capital, this concept was not taken seriously by people, and even met with great resistance. However, with the role of human capital in economic development becoming more and more clear, the importance of human capital has begun to be recognized and accepted by more and more people. The influence of human capital investment on social and economic development is various, and its influence mechanism can be seen from Figure 4. The diversity of human capital's influence on social and economic development is not only reflected in the diversity of human capital investment forms, but also in the diversity of social and economic activities it affects.
People are increasingly aware that economic growth alone is not enough to achieve social development, and only the all-round development of human beings is the best embodiment of social progress, and many contents contained in human capital just reflect human development. In recent years, humanistic development has been widely recognized and valued. In developing countries, the social and economic development model with the goal and approach of human capital accumulation is considered as the basic means to get rid of poverty. Of the eight Millennium Development Goals proposed by the United Nations, five are related to human development. This fully shows that human capital accumulation has been widely regarded as the goal of development.
China's economic development achievements after the reform and opening up have attracted worldwide attention, and the accumulation of human capital has also contributed. 1982, the average educational years of the population above 15 in China was 5.33 years, which was higher than 3.57 years (1980 figure) in 73 developing countries 1.76 years. By 2000, the average years of education of the population over 0/5 years old in China/KLOC increased to 7.85 years, an increase of about 47.28%, and increased to 5. 13 years with these 73 developing countries.
Compared with 2000, the education years of the working-age population in China are 2.72 years longer than those in these developing countries.
The analysis of the sources of economic growth in the past 20 years after the reform and opening up shows that the improvement of human capital level is an important reason for China's rapid economic growth. As shown in Figure 5, through the improvement of population education quality, the share of economic growth is 24%, which is equivalent to the contribution share of labor input. In recent years, with the continuous increase of human capital investment, the quality of labor force has been significantly improved. It can be expected that the accumulation of human capital in the future will be an increasingly important driving force for China's sustained economic growth.
Fourth, the demographic dividend of healthy aging.
The concept of "healthy aging population dividend" has two meanings. First, if the traditional demographic dividend comes from the changes in labor supply and savings rate caused by the scale, proportion and growth rate of the working-age population, then the so-called second demographic dividend by demographic economists is accompanied by aging and a good social pension security system, which is related to the savings motivation and savings level after the aging population. Second, the increase of life expectancy at birth and the life expectancy of the elderly population is an important reason for the aging of the population. However, aging is healthy and worthy of being a valuable human resource and human capital. So what we can see here is the demographic dividend observed from the perspective of labor supply and human capital accumulation.
The source of growth we observed decreased with the change of population age structure, that is, aging is actually only the "first demographic dividend", which is mainly manifested in abundant labor force and light population burden, resulting in high savings rate and making additional contributions to economic growth. However, while this advantage is gradually disappearing, we still have the opportunity to get the "second demographic dividend" (Lee
Mei Sen,
2006), that is, when the population structure tends to be aging, individuals and families can take precautions, generate new savings motives and form new sources of savings, and their investment in domestic and international financial markets can also gain income. Moreover, the experience, skills and other human capital of the healthy elderly population can also expand the supply of human resources and prolong the demographic dividend.
First of all, the key to this demographic dividend is to design a good system, so that people will no longer rely on family pension or pay-as-you-go system, but realize a completely accumulated old-age security system. Forming an old-age security system according to this idea is equivalent to starting the mechanism of the second demographic dividend accumulation and gradually replacing the first demographic dividend. As far as the first demographic dividend is concerned, it will disappear when the population structure is no longer young and the proportion of working-age population does not increase, but the second demographic dividend can last forever after the first demographic dividend and obtain a new source of economic growth.
Secondly, realizing this demographic dividend requires a more flexible, effective and secure labor market. In the years when employment pressure is still high, the actual retirement age of China's urban labor market is about 5 1 year, which is different from the legal retirement age. If the labor market is not conducive to employment, some workers who have not yet reached the statutory retirement age may voluntarily or be forced to withdraw from the labor market early, resulting in the actual retirement age being less than the statutory retirement age. The United States, Japan, the European Union and other major developed countries are all over 60 years old. In China, the working-age population aged 50-64 accounts for 20% of the total working-age population aged 65,438+05-64. That is, if the actual retirement age is only 5 1.
18 years old, labor resources are greatly wasted. In the past, we looked at the problem of population aging from the perspective of the denominator of indicators, ignoring the characteristics of molecules, that is, the population aging is not only due to the decrease of the relatively young population and the decline of the proportion, but also due to the increase of life expectancy, that is, the elderly live longer. With the improvement of economic and social development level and the demographic transition entering a new stage, life expectancy at birth has greatly increased (Figure
6), not only significantly higher than the world average, but also higher than the average level of upper-middle income countries. Therefore, considering the improvement of life expectancy, increasing investment in people can make the elderly population more productive instead of becoming a burden to society.
After 30 years of family planning, China has made great achievements in population control, population structure adjustment and population quality improvement. At the same time, it also laid a good foundation for further improving the health level of the population and prolonging the healthy life. With the formation of the concept of big population, the population policy pays more attention to the investment in people, and the establishment and improvement of an appropriate social security system, the healthy elderly population can create a new demographic dividend, thus maintaining the sustainability of China's economic growth and social development.