Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/8051008
As a result of the one-child policy, China’s fertility rate was well below 2 children per woman for more than three decades.
At the same time, according to the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute, the average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 in China stood at 485,000 yuan ($76,629) for a first child in 2019, almost seven times China’s per capita GDP that year ($10,144). The financial burden has many families thinking twice before adding members to their family.
The combination of more retirees and a shrinking working-age population means fewer people have to support a larger share of the population, putting pressure on Beijing’s health care and pension programs.
That analysis would be sufficiently absurd without trying to cram it into a “fact check” format. That it took 40 years since the start of the “one child policy” for the population to actually start declining in any meaningful way is indicative of the fact that to understand these things you need more long-term thinking than is even hinted at here. Will the present trend hurt next year’s GDP growth? Yes. Will they be better off for it 50 years from now? Probably.