Slowing Down with Age: The Ominous Implications of Workforce Aging for Canadian Living Standards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this issue... Population aging has the potential to dramatically lower Canadian living standards. While increases in work effort can alleviate the downward pressure, a strong negative association between an elderly workforce and labour productivity is likely to limit improvements from this source. A policy environment that encourages saving and capital accumulation may be Canada’s best hope for escaping the limits on wellbeing that demographic change will otherwise impose. The Study in Brief Population aging represents a serious obstacle to maintaining a healthy growth rate in Canadian living standards. The projected decrease in the ratio of working population to total population signifies that Canada will require strong labour productivity growth over the coming decades in order to maintain past rates of growth in output per capita. At the same time, demographic change may have a negative influence on the productive capacity of the Canadian economy. This is clear from the projected negative effects of population and workforce aging on productivity, labour and capital growth, the three broad historical sources of economic expansion. After reviewing their relative importance as historical sources of output growth, this paper attempts to preview the direct effect of workforce and population aging on multifactor productivity, hours worked and capital accumulation over the next four decades. Regression results show that an older workforce will likely be less productive and also contribute less working hours to the economy, increasing the importance of capital accumulation in the future. Public policies that encourage saving and capital accumulation thus appear increasingly important, all the more so because saving is also likely to be negatively affected by population aging.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".