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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Aging and Public Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1502713

Population aging, technological innovation and industrial differentiation

Provisionally accepted
Chunhua Li Chunhua Li Zhangqing Chen Zhangqing Chen Wangchun Wu Wangchun Wu Bin Gao Bin Gao *Lingfeng Zou Lingfeng Zou
  • Guangxi Minzu University, Guangxi, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    As China's aging population deepens and its pace accelerates, it is particularly crucial to rely on technological innovation to drive industrial differentiation. Is there a connection between population aging, technological innovation, and industrial differentiation? Does technological innovation have a moderating effect? Based on the panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2006 to 2022, this paper constructs the entropy index to measure the overall industrial differentiation and tertiary industrial differentiation in China, and subsequently investigates the relationship among the three using the two-way fixed effect model. The results indicate that population aging has a significant positive impact on the overall industrial differentiation in China, with a regression coefficient of 1.1025. Technological innovation plays a positive moderating role, with an interaction coefficient of 0.3489. The effects of population aging on the differentiation of the three industries differ: the regression coefficient for the primary industry is -0.6437, which is significantly negative; for the secondary industry, the regression coefficient is 0.9252, which is statistically insignificant; and for the tertiary industry, the regression coefficient is 0.1539, which is significantly positive.

    Keywords: technological innovation, Industrial differentiation, Moderating Effec, Industrialization, Inter-regional differences.

    Received: 10 Oct 2024; Accepted: 07 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Li, Chen, Wu, Gao and Zou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Bin Gao, Guangxi Minzu University, Guangxi, China

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