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This paper analyzes the effects of an unfunded pension system on economic growth using an extended overlapping generations model to include the informal sector. Emerging countries usually have a more significant informal sector than advanced ones. The findings based on the Thai economy data suggest that an increase in unfunded pension payouts and the noncontributory old-age allowance induces lower output and changes the consumption profiles of the workers. Furthermore, it reduces households’ incentives to save and provide labor, especially among formal workers, which lowers the physical capital stock in the new steady state.

This study aimed to estimate the work capacity of older Indonesians based on their health condition and other characteristics. Two analytic methods were used in this analysis—the Milligan–Wise method and the Cutler–Meara–Richards-Shubik method—and they found relatively small and substantial additional work capacities, respectively. The results showed that mortality alone may not be able to explain the additional work capacity due to only small improvements in the health conditions of older people. The effect of poverty, the dominance of the informal sector, low educational attainment and skills, and inadequate government social protection and assistance were also responsible for the continued employment of older people until serious health conditions halted their economic activities. Thus, several features were highlighted in this study: (i) the feasibility of extending the pensionable age, (ii) flexible terms for a pension scheme for informal workers, (iii) improved health conditions by expanding the noncontributory health insurance, and (iv) upgraded skills for older workers.

While most studies have shown that an aging population has a negative impact on economic growth, the potentially positive factor of a young elderly population may be neglected. The purpose of this study is to investigate the following two hypotheses: the young elderly population (aged from 60 to 69) with a strong academic background has a positive impact on the economy in China, and the elderly population has a negative impact on the economy in China. Official provincial-level panel data from 1996 to 2016 for 29 provinces are utilized in fixed-effects models with and without controlling for heteroskedasticity and cross-sectional dependence, as well as in DIFF-GMM and SYS-GMM models in the dynamic panel regression estimation. The primary finding of this study is that young elderly people with a strong educational background can positively affect China’s economic growth and can partly alleviate the negative effect of the overall elderly population. This conclusion is quite robust regardless of which econometric method is adopted.

With China’s rapidly aging population, this paper constructs a policy model using overlapping generation (OLG) model and the computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling to analyze the second-child policy and delaying retirement policy. Our research findings suggest that considering the short-term effects, delaying the retirement age imposes a greater impact on the economy than the second-child policy. Its economic impact increases initially, but then decreases to a stable level showing a diminishing influence. In the long term, the second-child policy has greater ability to boost the economy than the delaying retirement age policy and its economic impact gets stronger. From an industrial output perspective, the two policies exert greater influence on agriculture, light industry, finance and service sector than on construction and heavy industries. From an industrial import and export perspective, the two policies have great influence on finance, electric power, and fossil energy more than they do on the agricultural sector. From a monetary perspective, the impacts are greater on household income followed by the government income and corporate income, respectively. The policies also make a bigger difference to fixed capital than to changes in deposits and loans.

Singapore’s rapidly aging population poses significant challenges to the government’s long-term fiscal sustainability as it structurally affects government revenue and expenditure. Amidst the demographic trends, total government spending has skyrocketed to unprecedented amounts in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper evaluates Singapore’s fiscal sustainability and intergenerational fiscal impacts through the lens of generational accounting and actuarial analyses, before and after COVID-19. Our model predicts a pre-COVID absolute intergenerational gap of S$512 thousand between future generations and current newborns, implying that there is considerable intergenerational inequity. This gap increases by a further S$67 thousand after factoring in COVID-19’s impact on government net spending and short-term fertility rates. Fiscal balance can be restored in the short term and intergenerational equity in the long term, after incorporating key policy changes such as Goods and Services Tax (GST) hike and carbon tax increases.

This study examines the impact of aging on the effectiveness of various fiscal expenditures, including government consumption, one-time government transfers to households, public investment and R&D spending, using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Our findings reveal that (1) Aging enhances the effects of the transfer on augmenting GDP. (2) Regardless of aging, R&D expenditure consistently stands out over all time spans, with younger society benefiting more. (3) Public investment ranks second among for different fiscal policies in the long run, while shows bigger impact in younger society. (4) One-time transfer has only a temporary effect and is the least effective in boosting GDP in both young and old societies. (5) Multipliers for public investment and R&D expenditure increase with the accumulation of public capital and TFP. Their multiplier of young society is larger than old society because impact on consumption is much more effective.

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