Paris (AFP) – The end of China’s one-child-per-couple limit last year will not provide the population boost sought by Chinese leaders in the near term, according to a study released Friday.<\/p>\n
Any potential benefits the new “two-child” rule might have for the nation’s shrinking workforce and rapidly ageing population will not be felt for at least two decades, the study concluded.<\/p>\n
China is faced with deep demographic challenges thanks to the strict — and sometimes brutal — enforcement of its single child policy, introduced in 1979 at the end of the Mao Zedong era.<\/p>\n
The new rules will “allow most people to have their desired number of children and help address the skewed sex ratio,” said Therese Hesketh, a researcher at University College London and co-author of the study, published in The Lancet.<\/p>\n
The two-child limit will also reduce the number of abortions of unapproved pregnancies, and could eliminate the problem of unregistered children, she said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“But the effect on population ageing and the shrinking workforce will take longer to be felt.”<\/p>\n
China has 220 million people 60 or older, accounting for over 16 percent of its total population, the government said in July.<\/p>\n
The country’s workforce is on track to decline by as much as 23 percent by 2050.<\/p>\n
The retirement age is 55 for women, and 60 for men.<\/p>\n
The most populous nation on Earth, China counted 1.37 billion people at the end of 2015.<\/p>\n
The one-child policy was introduced by top leader Deng Xiaoping to curb population growth and promote economic development.<\/p>\n
The result was dramatic: fertility rates dropped from 5.9 births per woman in 1970 to about 1.6 in the late 1990s.<\/p>\n
Concerns mounted about demographic imbalance, but Chinese leaders hesitated to simply abolish the one-child policy, fearing it would lead to a population explosion.<\/p>\n
As a half-way measure, they allowed parents who were themselves only-children to have two of their own.<\/p>\n
But by May 2015, only 1.45 million couples — less than 15 percent of those eligible — applied to have a second child.<\/p>\n
In October last year, the two-child policy was made universal.<\/p>\n
One of the perverse effects of the one-child policy — coupled with the introduction of medical ultrasound technology — was a sharp rise in the abortion of unwanted female foetuses.<\/p>\n
On current trends, the report said, there will be more than 30 million “unmarriageable” men in China by 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paris (AFP) – The end of China’s one-child-per-couple limit last year will not provide the population boost sought by Chinese leaders in the near term, according to a study released Friday. Any potential benefits the new “two-child” rule might have for the nation’s shrinking workforce and rapidly ageing population will not be felt for at Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}