Effects of Population Aging on Gross Domestic Product per Capita in the Canadian Provinces: Could Productivity Growth Provide an Offset?

Abstract

A shift in population distribution toward older ages is underway in industrialised countries throughout the world and will continue well into the future. We make use of a framework that we developed in earlier work to isolate the pure effects of population aging on per capita GDP in the 10 Canadian provinces and derive the rates of productivity growth required to offset those effects. For comparison, we consider also some changes relating to the supply of labour as possible alternative offsets.