As China's population ageing deepens, addressing demographic shifts while advancing common prosperity has become a key policy concern. The silver economy is expected to balance economic growth with social welfare improvement, and is widely believed to play a coordinating role between promoting economic growth and enhancing social welfare. However, its specific moderating mechanism in the relationship between population ageing and common prosperity remains underexamined. Existing research focuses mainly on the macroeconomic consequences of population ageing or explores the silver economy from an industrial perspective, with few studies integrating both aspects within a unified analytical framework. Drawing on the Neo-Cambridge growth model and the overlapping generations (OLG) model, this paper constructs an integrated framework encompassing population ageing, the silver economy, and common prosperity. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and related sources from 2012 to 2022, this study systematically investigates the interrelations and underlying mechanisms among these three dimensions.
The main findings are as follows. First, population ageing has a significant positive effect on common prosperity, and the silver economy further strengthens this positive effect. Second, the silver economy reinforces the promoting effect of population ageing on common prosperity through three primary channels: optimizing the structure of primary distribution, reducing reliance on government transfer income, and promoting labor participation. These mechanisms operate across both market and government dimensions, reflecting an evolutionary shift from government-led to market-led dynamics. Third, the positive moderating effect of the silver economy exhibits significant heterogeneity. This moderating effect is more pronounced among younger olderhouseholds and urban older households, indicating that the silver economy's moderating effect does not yet have a distinct pro-poor orientation.
By incorporating the silver economy, this study offers a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between population ageing and common prosperity, thereby broadening the research horizon on common prosperity. Its marginal contributions are threefold. First, it extends research on the driving mechanisms of common prosperity by addressing the insufficient attention paid to endogenous market forces. Second, by integrating population ageing, the silver economy, and common prosperity into a unified analytical framework, it reveals the context-dependent nature of demographic shifts' economic consequences, moving beyond the one-sided claim that “ageing inevitably undermines development performance”. Third, using micro-level household data, it overcomes the masking effect of macro-aggregated data on distributional inequality and identifies how the silver economy's moderating effect varies across different population groups, thereby complementing studies on the complexity of governing an ageing society.
The findings provide important policy implications.First, in advancing common prosperity, undue concern about the adverse effects of population ageing is unnecessary. Instead, greater attention should be paid to the structural enabling role of the silver economy. Second, the transition from a government-led to a market-led pathway to common prosperity should be strengthened, alongside better coordination between market-based wage income growth and social security sharing, guiding the silver economy to play a sustained role in optimizing primary distribution, reducing transfer income reliance, and promoting labor participation. Third, the positive moderating effects of the silver economy should be made more inclusive and pro-poor so as to accelerate common prosperity progress among oldest-old households and rural older households.
