Population Aging and High-Quality Economic Development: Based on Feature Selection and Empirical Analysis of Provincial Panel Data

Based on the severe situation of population aging and the requirements for high-quality economic development in China, this paper applies provincial panel data from 2012 to 2021, and uses Lasso and Elastic Net feature selection algorithms to select the variables affecting high-quality economic development. Additionally, this paper measures an indicator of high-quality economic development by entropy method, and empirically tests the impact of population aging on high quality economic development. The results show that, the level of high-quality economic development has declined in time, and the regional heterogeneity has decreased spatially. Through the application of Lasso and Elastic Net regression models for variable selection, the accuracy of measuring an indicator of high-quality economic development is effectively improved, which makes the research results more interpretable. Empirically, this paper finds a significant negative impact of population aging on high-quality economic development, hindering China's progress in this regard. Therefore, China should actively address the issue of population aging to promote high-quality economic development.