Research on the measurement of the silver economy and its impact on China’s economic development

The silver economy is one of the most dynamic and promising economic sectors in an aging society. The article constructed the evaluation index system of China’s silver economy development level from four aspects: development conditions, development power, development space, and development guarantee, measured the development level of China’s silver economy in 30 provinces from 2013 to 2023 by using CRITIC-entropy weight method, and revealed the dynamic evolution law of China’s silver economy development level by adopting the Kernel density estimation, the spatial Markov chain and the spatial convergence model, and utilized the variance model to predict the dynamic evolution law of China’s silver economy development level. Kernel density estimation, spatial Markov chain and spatial convergence model were used to reveal the dynamic evolution law of China’s silver economic development level, and the variance decomposition method was used to explore the degree of influence of each subsystem on China’s silver economic development level. Key findings include: (1)the level of China’s silver economic development has been improving year by year, and the latter regions are catching up with the first regions with a faster development speed; (2)the level of China’s silver economic development has a strong stability, and the level of development has been upgraded through the development of the inter-period; (3)the variance decomposition further reveals that the factors affecting the differences in the level of China’s silver economic development vary from region to region. (4)Further research shows that the silver economy can have a positive and significant contribution to China’s economic growth, but the impact of the silver economy on China’s economic growth is heterogeneous across subsystems and regions, and the impact of the silver economy on the overall economic development is still confined to intra-region, and does not have a significant spillover effects on neighboring regions.