A Study of Population Aging and Urban–Rural Residents’ Consumption Habits from a Spatial Spillover Perspective: Evidence from China

The issue of population aging and imbalanced urban–rural development are two major economic realities and difficulties in China. They constitute important factors affecting the sustainable development of urban and rural areas. The main objective of this study is to analyze the impact of population aging on the consumption levels of urban and rural residents, including overall and subdivided. The secondary objective is to analyze whether this impact has spatial spillover effects so that the bias caused by ignoring the mutual influence between regions could be eliminated. We used global and local Moran’s I, the spatial SLM model, and the SEM model to econometrically analyze the provincial panel data of urban and rural areas obtained from 2010 to 2021. This study found that, first, the distributions of the total consumption and population aging levels of Chinese urban and rural areas are not random and all have obvious spatial dependence characteristics. More specifically, all distributions present significant H-H or L-L clustering phenomena in local space. In other words, high-level areas are surrounded by high-level areas, while low-level areas are surrounded by low-level areas. Second, population aging has a significant negative impact on the overall consumption levels of urban residents and positively increases the consumption level of rural residents, which indicates that population aging will eliminate the urban–rural consumption gap and balance regional economic development to a certain extent. Third, from the perspective of consumption structure, the negative impact of population aging on different consumption expenditure items of urban residents varies, and the effect on various consumption expenditure items of rural residents also shows heterogeneity. Fourth, in terms of the spatial spillover effect, the influence of population aging on the consumption level of urban residents has a significant negative spatial spillover effect; however, in the rural group, the spatial spillover effect caused by the population aging level on the consumption level is not significant. This study provides a new spatial perspective for studying aging and urban–rural consumption inequality behavior, and serves as a reference for the government to further promote the sustainable development of urban–rural consumption in the future.