The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Sustainable Development of the Silver Economy: Empirical Evidence from China

Population aging is accelerating alongside rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI). This study examines whether AI development is associated with the sustainable development of the silver economy, the potential channels through which this relationship may operate, and the conditions under which its strength or direction changes. Using provincial-level panel data from China for 2014–2023, we construct composite indices of AI development and the sustainable development of the silver economy using the entropy-weighting method and estimate a two-way fixed-effects model with province and year fixed effects. Province-clustered standard errors are used for inference in the main fixed-effects analyses. The fully controlled baseline specification shows a significant positive association between AI and the sustainable development of the silver economy. This result remains positive and significant after two-sided 1% winsorization, the exclusion of municipalities and the 2020–2022 period, and a one-period lag of AI. A policy-intensity instrumental-variable (IV) specification also yields a positive estimate close in magnitude to the baseline result. Two-step mechanism tests show that AI development is positively associated with service provision efficiency and research and development (R&D) investment intensity, providing evidence consistent with the proposed service-efficiency and innovation-input channels. Financial development significantly strengthens this association. Formal between-group tests indicate a significant openness-related difference and a weaker industrialization-related difference. The threshold analysis identifies a significant single threshold in marketization: the estimated AI coefficient is negative when the marketization index is at or below 7.039 and positive when the index exceeds this threshold. These findings indicate that the relationship between AI development and the silver economy is conditional on the absorptive capacity of service and innovation systems and on complementary financial and market institutions. By focusing on heterogeneous aging-related demand and the service-intensive nature of the silver economy, this study provides provincial-level evidence on the potential channels and boundary conditions linking AI to the sustainable development of the silver economy.