how are demographic changes important for economists 
economists recognize that one of the major drivers of economic growth is population growth or decline there is a straightforward relationship when identifying this growth rate of gross domestic product gdp growth rate of population growth rate of gdp per capita where gdp per capita is simply gdp divided by population the more people around the more available workers there are in the labor force and also more people to consume items like food energy cars and clothes there are also demographic problems that lie on the horizon such as an increasing number of retirees who while no longer in the workforce are nonetheless expected to live longer lives unfortunately the number of new births seems to be too low to replace those retirees in the workforce the bottom linedemographics and demographic analysis is used to describe the distribution of characteristics in a society or other population in order to understand them make policy recommendations and make predictions about where a society or group is headed in the future demographic data can come in many forms but most often describes the distribution of characteristics found in populations such as age sex gender marital status household structure income wealth education religion and so on and to see how these are changing over time birth and death rates are also used to understand if a population is growing or not and how this might affect things like economic growth employment government programs like social security and so on 