Population Aging and Productivity. Does Culture Matter? Some Evidence from the EU

The expected change in population age structure in all the EU
countries will lead to a substantially higher proportion of older workers, with
significant consequences for socioeconomic development. This essential change
will have deep consequences and the most debated effect is on labor productivity.
Although several studies have been conducted to examine the relationship
between aging, workforce productivity and growth, relatively lower attention
has been paid to non-instrumental factors that may have a particular impact on
working age and productivity. Moving from a cultural economics standpoint,
this paper aims to explore the relationships among culture, aging and productivity
in the EU. In particular, our study investigates whether workers’ participation
in cultural activities may be correlated to their productivity by stimulating
their physical and mental capacities. The underlying hypothesis is that culture
contributes to improving labor force attitudes and is therefore a relevant, additional
explanatory variable when examining lower productivity due to population
aging. We perform a multidimensional scaling (MDS) to explore
similarities among the EU countries in terms of productivity, workforce aging
and cultural participation in the years between 2006 and 2016. Both for 2006
and 2016 our data show a close and positive correlation between productivity
and cultural consumption on the part of aging people. The correlation revealed
by our analyses can be read in bidirectional terms, thus ultimately allowing us to
tackle the crucial research question: is older workers’ productivity positively
related to their participation in cultural activities?