The demographic dividend has long been viewed as an important factor for economic development and provided a rationale for policies aiming at a more balanced age structure through birth control and family planning. Assessing the relative importance of age structure and increases in human capital, recent work has argued that the demographic dividend is related to education and has suggested a dominance of improving education over age structure. Here we reconsider the empirical relevance of shifts in the age distribution for development for a panel of 159 countries over the period 1950 to 2015. Based on a flexible model of age-structured human capital endowments, the results document important interactions between age structure and human capital endowments, suggesting that arguments of clear dominance of education over age structure are unwarranted and lead to potentially misleading policy conclusions. An increase in the working-age population share has a strong and significant positive effect on growth, even conditional on human capital, in line with the conventional notion of a demographic dividend. An increase in human capital only has positive growth effects if combined with a suitable age structure. An increasing share of the most productive age groups has an additional positive effect on economic performance. Finally, the results show considerable heterogeneity in the effect of age structure and human capital for different levels of development. Successful policies for sustainable development should take this heterogeneity into account to avoid detrimental implications of a unidimensional focus on human capital without accounting for demography.

长期以来，人口红利一直被视为经济发展的重要因素，并为旨在通过节育和计划生育实现更加平衡的年龄结构的政策提供了理论依据。评估年龄结构和增加人力资本的相对重要性，最近的工作认为，人口红利与教育有关，并显示出在年龄结构上改善教育的主导地位。在这里，我们重新考虑了1950年至2015年期间159个国家/地区小组的发展年龄分布变化的经验相关性。基于年龄结构的人力资本end赋的灵活模型，结果证明了年龄结构与人类之间的重要相互作用资本end赋 这表明在年龄结构上明确支配教育的论点是毫无根据的，并可能导致误导性的政策结论。与传统的人口红利概念相一致，工作年龄人口份额的增加对增长具有强大而显着的积极影响，甚至以人力资本为条件。如果结合适当的年龄结构，人力资本的增加只会产生积极的增长作用。生产力最高的年龄段中越来越多的份额对经济表现产生了额外的积极影响。最后，结果表明年龄结构和人力资本对于不同发展水平的影响存在很大的异质性。