One child changes: No effect?
A few weeks ago we mentioned the news that China was relaxing its despicably evil One Child Policy. Understandably perhaps, the only response to that post was scepticism that we should take anything that the Chinese Government says at face value. To add a large pinch of salt to anything announced by the Chinese Government is certainly a prudent thing to do, but the fact that it acknowledged publically that a bedrock piece of social engineering was no longer desirable is surely worthy of mention and comment.
Then, a couple of weeks after that announcement, Dermot Grenham wrote a great post arguing that China may not be able to lift birth rates anyway due to changes in Chinese attitudes to sex and family ingrained by decades of propaganda. Today, I wanted to follow up Grenham’s post with a piece from the Wall Street Journal that argues that the relaxation of the One Child Policy will make little difference to the demographic problems that China faces:
“In the short term, the change can’t mean much for the shrinking of the country’s labor supply. ‘It’s not going to increase size of the working-age population for 20 to 25 years,’ said Richard Jackson, director of the Global Aging Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. ‘So the economic impact is long-term.’”
Allied to this is the fact that the number of potential parents who can benefit from this relaxation is a smaller cohort than the one that went before it due to the One Child Policy itself. There is a large ageing population being supported by a smaller younger tier or workers. Unsurprising really, when you have stopped the older generation reproducing for 40 plus years!
“Part of the problem, International Monetary Fund researchers Mitali Das and Papa N’Diaye said in joint responses to questions, is that the aging of China’s population is so significant, ‘it would need a pretty large increase in the birth rate to really counter it.’”