Michael Cameron (p)

Timon Hellwagner

The structural ageing of the population is one of the key global trends of the 21st Century. The importance of population ageing has gained prominence because of a growing recognition that future populations will include an increasing share of older people, raising potentially important resource implications for national and local governments alike. In this paper, I summarise past, present, and future measures of population ageing for New Zealand at the regional and territorial authority level. This exercise highlights two key facts. First, all subnational areas have been, and are projected to continue, ageing. Second, not all subnational areas are ageing at the same rate. Moreover, the ranking of subnational areas in terms of past, present, and future ageing depends on the measure of structural ageing that is employed. In particular, I highlight the differences between ‘traditional’ measures of structural ageing, such as the median age or the proportion of the population aged 65 years and over, and a new class of axiomatically-consistent structural ageing measures developed by Cameron (2022). Looking more deeply at the results, it appears that more rural and peripheral areas have been ageing faster than more urban and peri-urban areas, and will continue to do so into the future. Policymakers and other decision-makers should remain cognisant of the importance of subnational population ageing.

Alex Petric (p), Dawn Cassandra Parker , Sean Geobey, Kirsten Wright

Michael Cameron

Over the past decade, Canada's Waterloo Region has experienced significant population growth and a resulting wave of housing construction, but house prices and rents in the Region have continued to rise. To tackle the broader housing crisis affecting Ontario and Canada, calls for increased housing construction have grown, but advocates often estimate the quantities of homes needed by considering overall population and average household size, without considering different housing types or the household compositions of populations in need. Using publicly available data, we analyze temporal and spatial trends in housing construction and population growth across Waterloo Region to assess how changes in housing and population compared at the census tract level. We also assess housing indicators across household types, bedroom counts, income categories, and related socio-economic indicators to highlight groups deserving greater attention in community planning efforts. Based on our findings, we propose including equity-based analysis in future housing and land needs assessments to account for a wider range of needs. We further explore and discuss the potential for “missing middle” housing to address a wider variety of household needs, and we propose options for Canadian municipalities looking to support greater housing diversity and supply as a means of addressing housing needs in Canada.

Timon Hellwagner (p), Enzo Weber

Alex Petric

In many countries, national population shrinkage is impending, which is mirrored by increasing attention in public and academic debates. The economic literature has recently started to focus on the effects of population decline, but many questions remain unanswered. This also applies to the effects of population decline on the capital stock, determined by investment decisions of firms. The question whether the looming shrinkage of one production factor, labor, may already be a drag on the other, is of crucial importance, given that the transition to a green and digital economy requires substantial investment. However, addressing this question with data at the national level is difficult due to the absence of a sufficient number of observations. By contrast, on the regional level, there is substantial variation, both in experiencing population decline in the past and in expecting the same for the future. Yet, inferring the effects of shrinkage on investments from this regional variation is demanding, and goes beyond the descriptive comparison of indicators in growing and declining regions. Bias can occur from the moderating roles of business cycle effects and labor market tightness but also from the absence of an appropriate spatial perspective that accounts for functional interactions, such as commuting. Addressing these issues, we link data from a representative survey of more than 15,000 establishments across Germany in the period from 1993 to 2021 with fine-grained statistics at the municipal level on population, unemployment, vacancies, and driving times. Using this panel dataset, we estimate the effects of experienced and expected regional working-age population decline on firm investments, thereby not only carving out the role of demographically induced shortages vice versa those driven by tight or booming labor markets, but providing insight how region-specific demographic developments interact with the national and global challenge of a green and digital transition.