باروری، رشد اقتصادی، و تعیین علی توسعه انسانی شیوه زندگی توسعه یافته

The paper focuses on the long-term determinants of economic development and demographic transition and identifies the causal structure governing the triad of high income, high human development and low fertility rates defined as the “developed lifestyle”. We construct a balanced panel for 72 countries between 1980 and 2007 and use panel unit-root and cointegration tests. In estimating the long-run relationship between cointegrated variables, we use the dynamic OLS (DOLS) estimation techniques. Empirical results show a causal long-run relationship between high income, high human development and low fertility. The evolution of the developed lifestyle differs significantly, however. In advanced economies, the demographic transition is essentially complete and therefore only changes in human development and income matter. In developing countries, fertility is negatively related with human development, but positively with income and – consistently with Galor and Mountford, 2006 and Galor and Mountford, 2008 – trade. Moreover, we find no significant impact from human development on income – either for advanced economies or for developing countries.

In the last two and a half decades, economic growth theory has expanded the list of fundamental development processes to include not only income but also human capital, demographic transition, technology/urbanization, institutions, and economic integration. Some of these processes are closer to being the main causal backbone of economic development than others. In particular, one major characterization of economic development is the “developed lifestyle” defined as high income, high human capital, and low fertility. This article questions the long-term determinants of the developed lifestyle and seeks to identify the causal structure governing the triad of income, human development (i.e. human capital) and fertility. Clarifying the interaction of these components of the human development process is crucial for identifying the causal structure of long-run economic development. To address this question, we apply cointegration techniques to an annual panel on economic development combining the UNDP dataset on human development indicators of Gidwitz et al. (2010) with the World Development Indicators dataset (World Bank, 2010). In particular, we construct a balanced panel for 72 countries between 1980 and 2007 and use panel unit-root and cointegration tests to determine the causal structure for the developed lifestyle, while controlling for institutions, technology/urbanization, and economic integration. To estimate the long-run relationship between the cointegrated variables, we use the dynamic OLS (DOLS) estimation techniques proposed by Kao and Chiang (2000) in order to avoid spurious regression results introducing leads and lags of first differences. This means that we account for the presence of the very short-term causal relations that are consistently present in the long run. As a robustness test, we also lag our explanatory variables to 5 years to test if long-run causal relations are more medium-term related. For example, there is no doubt that fertility has its major impact on human capital and income in the future, but higher levels of education lead to lower fertility rates and higher income in the very short-run. Empirical results show a causal long-run relationship between high income, high human development and low fertility. The evolution of the developed lifestyle differs significantly, however. In advanced economies, the demographic transition is essentially complete and therefore only changes in human development and income matter. In developing countries, fertility is negatively related with human development but positively with income and – consistently with Galor and Mountford, 2006 and Galor and Mountford, 2008 – trade. Moreover, we find no significant impact from human development on income as in Mayer-Foulkes (in press), which slows the transition to the developed lifestyle and therefore to economic development. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the literature on long-term economic development and outlines the existing empirical evidence. Section 3 describes the data. Non-stationary issues and estimation techniques are covered in Section 4, while Section 5 contains our empirical results. Section 6 presents the conclusions.

Empirical results show the causal structure of the long-run relationship between high income, high human development and low fertility, which is robust through the 1980–2007 horizon of our study. However, the evolution of the developed lifestyle is different in advanced economies and developing countries. Simply put, the demographic transition combined with high human development and high income has been completed in advanced countries, whereas it is an ongoing process in developing countries. In advanced economies, the demographic transition is essentially complete and therefore only changes in human development and income matter. In developing countries, fertility is negatively related with human development but positively with income and – consistently with Galor and Mountford, 2006 and Galor and Mountford, 2008 – trade. Moreover, we find no link from human development to income as in Mayer-Foulkes (in press), which slows the transition to the developed lifestyle and therefore to economic development. Only higher human development and therefore a higher education and a healthy population leads to lower fertility rates and can therefore close the gap against advanced economies. Interestingly, we have found no long-run related evidence that increased human development and higher fertility impacts income – either for advanced economies or for developing countries. Indeed, there are no long-run linkages to income from any of the variables tested, showing that change in income itself is not very systematic and might depend more on other variables such as technological progress and capital accumulation. For the period from 1980 to 2007, we conclude that developing countries have encountered significant difficulties in raising their returns to human capital and attaining the “developed lifestyle.” Because human capital returns are linked to technological change, we conclude that raising human capital returns can be achieved by strengthening technology transfer to the poor and to poor regions, eliminating the determinants of divergent economic development.