Japan at the forefront of the economics of aging? A bibliometric analysis

This paper analyzes how economists have considered the question of aging over the last fifty years. The major originality of this paper is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the economics of aging literature, based on the textual analysis of three different and complementary corpora, while existing studies only concern subfields. It shows that the definition of the economics of aging is less straightforward than expected and introduces some identification criteria to get quantitative results on the growth of the literature, its geography, and its research agenda. One claim of the paper is that aging has emerged as a distinct topic that spans different fields, from population to labor economics, and has strong connections with health economics, macroeconomics, and public economics. Topics of interest have evolved over time with notably a major growth for health issues, while pensions issues have been at the center of the investigation for several decades. In addition, we show that the geography of the economics of aging does not correspond to the geography of aging, with Japan somewhat underrepresented in the literature. Lastly, we draw some lessons from this neglect in the dominant research agenda on the economics of aging and suggest directions for future research that would give to Japan more space in comparative studies, given its position at the forefront of aging.