TY  - JOUR
AU  - Higgins,Matthew
AU  - Williamson,Jeffrey G.
TI  - Asian Demography and Foreign Capital Dependence
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5560
PY  - 1996
Y2  - May 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5560
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5560.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Matthew Higgins
Georgia Institute of Technology
College of Management
800 West Peachtree Street
Atlanta, GA 30308
Tel: 404/894-4368
Fax: 404/894-6030
E-Mail: matt.higgins@mgt.gatech.edu

Jeffrey G. Williamson
350 South Hamilton Street #1002
Madison, WI 53703
Tel: 608-441-0023
Fax: 608-204-0783
E-Mail: jwilliam@fas.harvard.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1996-11-01
AB  - Ansley Coale and Edgar Hoover were right about Asia.  Rising fertility and declining infant mortality have had a profound impact on Asian savings, investment and foreign capital dependency since Coale and Hoover wrote in 1958.  We argue that: Much of the impressive rise in Asian savings rates since the 1960s can be explained by the equally impressive decline in youth dependency burdens; Where Asia has kicked the foreign capital dependence habit is where youth dependency burdens have fallen most dramatically; Aging will not diminish Japan's capacity to export capital in the next century, but little of it will go to the rest of Asia since the rest will become net capital exporters, at least if demography is allowed to have its way.  These conclusions emerge from a model which rejects steady-state analysis in favor of transition analysis, and extends the conventional focus of the dependency rate literature on savings to investment and net capital flows.
ER  -