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Analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
Is an older economy a weaker economy?
The Federal Reserve concentrates on stable prices and low unemployment, the dual mandate handed down by the U.S. Congress. By law, the Fed sets policy for the economy as a whole, not to target particular economic sectors or to favor any demographic group, explains Atlanta Fed research economist Toni Braun.
A different question: Aging's impact on the environment in which policy is made
But what effect does an aging population have on the economic conditions in which monetary policy is formed? Many researchers have found, for example, that an aging population tends to put downward pressure on real interest rates, the rates of return after allowing for inflation.
Aging affects the real interest rate in a couple of basic ways. First, older people tend to be savers rather than borrowers. Younger people, by contrast, tend to be borrowers. Therefore, having relatively more savers and fewer borrowers drives interest rates lower because of supply and demand. More money flowing into savings means the banks and other institutions gathering those savings need not boost rates to attract those deposits.
Second, aggregate hours worked falls as the population ages and workers move into retirement. Lower aggregate labor input reduces the amount of output produced by each unit of capital. This in turn acts to reduce the real return from investing in capital, Braun explains.
Aging societies are already starting to experience downward pressure on interest rates—most notably in Japan. A 2009 paper Braun authored with Daisuke Ikeda and Douglas Joines was among the early research to document the implications of population aging on the real interest rate in Japan. (See the chart.) The authors found that the two biggest factors underlying the decline in Japan's real interest rate from 6 percent to 3.9 percent between 1990 and 2000 were rapid population aging and lower productivity growth.
Japan's After-Tax Real Interest
A large increase in life expectancy in Japan has meant that the baby boomers need to plan for longer retirement. Now, as they move into retirement, both the national savings rate and the interest rate are falling. The decline in the real interest rate is compounded by a declining fertility rate. A lower fertility rate translates into a smaller fraction of younger workers who seek to borrow funds to purchase homes and cars. A subsequent 2015 paper by Braun and Joines predicts the after-tax real interest rate in Japan will decline by a further 2 percentage points between 2010 and 2050, with aging a key driver of those declines.
Aging is acting to reduce interest rates in other advanced economies, too. San Francisco Fed economist Fernanda Nechio and coauthors Carlos Carvalho and Andrea Ferrero findthat population aging in a hypothetical representative developed country can account for about a third to a half of the total decline in the real interest rate between 1990 and 2014. An increase in life expectancy accounts for most of the drop, the authors conclude. As people expect to live longer and thus spend more years retired, they save more money for their retirement. The authors forecast that the real interest rate in their composite country will continue to fall for the next 40 years and then stabilize at about 2 percent.
Might monetary policy be less effective as the population ages?
Because of demography's downward pressure on interest rates, formulating effective monetary policy might be more difficult as the population ages. That's because interest rates set by market forces tend to move lower regardless of policy, Braun notes.
Again, Japan offers a model. The Pacific Rim nation is aging more than any other advanced country, as its working-age population is shrinking by roughly a million people a year. Aggressive monetary policy has made limited headway in reversing years of sluggish economic growth and falling prices, said Masaaki Shirakawa, professor of economics and former governor of Japan's central bank.
During a recent talk at the Atlanta Fed, Shirakawa said the mild deflation Japan experienced during the 1990s was often inaccurately cited as the cause of the country's slow economic growth. But the fundamental economic problem in Japan, Shirakawa said, is not deflation but rather a rapidly aging population.
Research suggests that a big reason why younger people react more strongly to interest-rate changes than do older people is homeownership. Younger people generally carry larger mortgages because older people have typically had more years to pay down their home loans, according to research by Arlene Wong. Because they owe more money, younger people have more reason to refinance their mortgages when interest rates drop. And among those who refinance when rates fall, consumption rises much more than among those who don't refinance, according to Wong.
It comes down to this: the conventional tool central banks use to stimulate the economy is lowering short-term nominal interest rates. However, when deposit rates become too low (or even negative), eventually people and businesses will choose to keep their cash to avoid "earning" a negative interest rate. Stored at home, $1 today equals $1 next year. When short-term nominal rates are negative, a deposit of $1 at a bank today will be worth less than$1 if withdrawn after one year.
As short-term nominal rates approach this threshold—the effective lower bound, or ELB—central banks have little recourse but to rely on other measures such as quantitative easing to stimulate the economy. This scenario happened during the Great Recession. With an aging population that exerts downward pressure on interest rates, it is possible—but not certain—that the economy and policymakers could confront the ELB more often.
Demographics is just one of many forces that determine growth and interest rates. However, aging is occurring in all advanced economies, and in some nations, the aging of the population is widespread and rapid. How societies adapt to a higher ratio of retirees to workers will no doubt influence how the Federal Reserve seeks to achieve its congressional mandate of low inflation and maximum employment.
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