Round 2: Author Response to Reviewer 2 Thank you.
The authors provide a very provocative conclusion (see below), but it is not supported by the analyses in the paper. The single-country analysis would provide the same results if done carefully, and the panel data analyses are dubious both because of the small cross-section (six) and the heterogeneity of the sample. I don’t mind the use panel analyses they can be presented for illustrative purposes, noting the heterogeneity. However, the time series analyses should be done correctly. Moreover, it is quite obvious that in simple bivariate cases, graphs can be very informative. However, the author(s) do not manage to provide any useful information about the dependency ratio in the ‘old fashioned’ analyses; they do only in Table 5 when (unknowingly) testing for cointegrating using OLS.