Commentary: China’s fertility crisis could kill its economic dynamism

Historically, demographics has been ดาวน์โหลด slotxo a slow-moving variable. But the East Asian economies – especially China, Japan, and South Korea – have flipped so fast from rapid population growth to decline that they practically have whiplash.

As a planned economy, China was once obsessed with expanding its population. But, in 1957, the economist Ma Yinchu published The New Theory of Population and cautioned that this trend would soon begin to undermine China’s economic development.

Though the government initially criticised his theory unfairly, Chinese leaders eventually took his warnings to heart, encouraging family planning as a way to promote economic growth.

In 1973, China went a step further, with the national wan, xi, shao (late marriage, longer spacing, and fewer children) campaign, which encouraged couples to have no more than two children.

Six years later, this escalated into the infamous one-child policy. To ensure its long-term impact, family planning was finally written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.

The fertility rate plummeted. By the mid-1980s, it hovered above the so-called substitution level of 2.1, compared to 6.0 in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1990s, the fertility rate fell to just 1.2 to 1.3 – a level that promised to hasten the country’s demographic ageing significantly.

The government nonetheless continued to enforce the one-child policy until 2016, when, finally, it shifted to a two-child policy.

With that, China’s fertility rate bounced back somewhat, reaching 1.58 in 2017, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. But it is now again on a downward slide, falling from 1.49 in 2018 to 1.47 in 2019.

According to the population economist James Liang, it may be set to return to 1990s levels.