The Relationship between Population Growth and Economic Growth Over 1870-2013: Evidence from a Bootstrapped Panel-Granger Causality Test

This study applies the bootstrap panel causality test proposed by Kónya (2006), which accounts for both dependency and heterogeneity across countries, to test the causal link between population growth and economic growth in 21 countries over the period of 1870-2013. With regards to the direction of population growth-economic growth nexus, we found one-way Granger causality running from population growth to economic growth for Finland, France, Portugal, and Sweden, one-way Granger causality running from economic growth to population growth for Canada, Germany, Japan, Norway and Switzerland, and no causal relationship between population growth and economic growth is found in Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sri Lanka, the UK, the USA and Uruguay. Furthermore, we found feedback between population growth and economic growth for Austria and Italy. Dividing the sample into two subsamples due to a structural break yielded different results in that for the first period of 1871-1951 we found that population growth Granger cause economic growth only for Finland and France, economic growth Granger cause population growth for Denmark, Japan, and Norway and that there is bidirectional causality between population growth and economic growth for both Austria and Italy. For the period of 1952-2013 we found that population growth Granger cause economic growth only for Sri Lanka, economic growth Granger cause population growth for Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and Uruguay and that found bidirectional causality between population growth and economic growth only for Japan. Our empirical results have important policy implications for these 21 countries under study as the directions of causality tend to differ across countries and depending on the time period under question.