Economic Growth and Population Ageing in Nigeria: Innovation Accounting Techniques

While global ageing suggests a triumph of social, economic, and medical advances over diseases, however, in economics regarding the growth implications of ageing, it is a puzzle as to what direction the effect will go. This motivates the current study to investigate empirically the economic growth consequences of population ageing in the context of Nigerian economy spanning between the period 1970 and 2015. Innovation Accounting Techniques was applied to assess the dynamic interactions among the variables. The results obtained revealed that the innovation in life expectancy and change in adult age dependency had the least contribution to the variation in per capita real GDP growth rate. The magnitude ranges between 1.45 and 8.33 percent. These results, thus, lend credence to the pessimistic view which contend that the inequality in a country’s population age structure, particularly, a greater share of the population of the elderly, depresses the country’s productivity level. Hence, the study recommends that any long term growth strategy aimed at boosting per capita income at a sustainable rate over the next ten (10) to fifteen (15) years needs to envision policies and reforms that are likely to foster savings and boost returns on them.