ИСТИНА

The impact of technological progress on economic growth is described in the studies of A. Young and Hsieh, who showed that most of the growth for the countries of the "Asian tigers" was due to capital accumulation, and not technological progress. To do this, Solow residuals were calculated, which show what part of the growth rate of labor productivity is not explained by the growth of physical capital and labor. For Russia, the Solow residuals were considered, for example, in the work of Korshunov V.A., Reinhardt R.O. The literature also studies the dependence of labor productivity growth rates on the age structure of the population, including for Russian regions (Artamonov, N.V., Kurbatskii, A.N., Khalimov, T.M. ,2021). It seems reasonable to assume that the age structure of the population affects economic growth exactly through its component, which is not explained by the growth of capital and labor, that is, through the Solow residual. The objective of this work is to study how the growth rate of total factor productivity (Solow residual) is related to the change in the age structure of the population in the regions of Russia. To calculate the growth of total factor productivity, R. Solow [5] proposed a method that uses the Cobb-Douglas production function with Hicks-neutral technical progress: Y=BK^α L^(1-α), where: Y – total production, L – labour input, K – capital input, B – total factor productivity, α and (1-α) – the output elasticities of capital and labor, respectively. To calculate the Solow residual, we can take the rate of output growth per unit of labor and the rate of capital growth per unit of labor from statistical data. To calculate the coefficient of elasticity of output by capital α, we can use the equilibrium equations in the capital or labor market in perfect competition. The assessment of capital growth rates in the regions is particularly difficult, since accumulated investments usually give a distorted assessment of capital, for example, due to the fact that investments can conceal the kickbacks.Assume that the real rental rate of capital R is constant for all regions (due to the mobility of capital between regions).Then we can get a equation for the rate of capital growth in the region, which will be equal to the sum of the rate of capital growth throughout the country and adjustments for the difference in GRP growth rates from GDP.In the course of the work, data were collected for the period from 2010 to 2020 for 80 regions of Russia. For this period, we calculated the Solow residuals using statistical data. We have assumed that the following factors may influence the Solow residual: dependency ratio, life expectancy, median age and mean age in the regions of Russia, and the ratio of the mean and median age, taken in logarithms. Then we use spatial econometrics methods to confirm these hypotheses.To identify spatial effects, we used the Moran's index and the Moran's test. The spatial correlation proved to be significant and was included in the model. It was found that the age structure of the population significantly affects the growth rate of total factor productivity in the regions of Russia: the marginal effects of the median age and the ratio of the mean age and median age are significant and positive, the marginal effects of the dependency ratio are significant and negative. The significance of life expectancy has not been confirmed.