Inflation and Population Age Structure: The Case of Emerging Economies

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between inflation and population age structure for emerging market economies. We form an unbalanced panel of data for 21 countries for the period 1950-2017 and include a number of additional control variables – terms of trade, exchange rate regime, debt-to-GDP ratio, broad money supply growth rates, and PPP-adjusted GDP per capita index. After estimating a variety of model specifications and robustness checks we conclude that the elderly group (65+) in these sample of countries is deflationary, the young group (0-19) shows weak signs of being deflationary, and the working group (20-64) is found to be inflationary. The deflationary effect of the elderly has been found in some studies for OECD countries, but the findings regarding the young group being deflationary and the working group being inflationary are new. Therefore, the question about the general empirical relation between inflation and the population age structure remains unsettled, and it is probable that the relation between population age structure and other macroeconomic variables is different for emerging market economies and for advanced countries.