Jeff Vincent - Nicholas School of Environment
Older human populations yield an environmental demographic dividend: increased tree cover
Date: 04/25/2025 (Fri)
Time: 2:00pm- 3:00pm
Location: This seminar will be held both on-site and remotely. The on-site location will be: Rubenstein 149- Sanford School. It will also be held remotely via Zoom. (Please sign in to see the link.)
Organizer: Alex Herrera, Paula Sarmiento and Xingchen Chen
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
2:00pm - Seminar Presentation (2:00pm to 3:00pm)
Additional Comments: Abstract: The effect of the age structure of human populations on economic growth—the “demographic dividend”—is well-known to development economists. In contrast, environmental economists and other social scientists, including demographers, have paid less attention to the effects of age structure on environmental outcomes. For example, models in the vast environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature often include aggregate population measures, such as population density, as explanatory variables for various environmental outcomes, but they seldom include variables on age structure. We investigate the effects of a more complete set of demographic variables—population density, in- and out-migration, and age structure—along with per capita GDP on changes in rural tree cover in low- and middle-income countries during 2005–2020. Our spatial units of analysis are 2nd-order administrative subdivisions (a.k.a. counties, districts). We find large and highly significant effects of age structure on tree-cover change, with the working-age share having a negative effect and the youth and elderly shares having positive effects. These effects are larger and more significant than the effects of more commonly used variables in EKC models, and they are robust to large changes in model specification (e.g., including or excluding fixed effects for subdivisions or time periods) and sample definition. The effect of the elderly share is especially large. Our findings suggest that greater attention to the age structure of human populations might help economists and other social scientists develop a better understanding of a range of environmental phenomena. Stage: Analysis complete, drafting manuscript Type of feedback: Which findings do you find most interesting; which features of the analysis do you find least convincing; which journals should we target.