China: How to Meet Population Challenges

ANDREW MASON, a professor of economics at the University of Hawaii, senior fellow at the East-West Center, and co-author of Population Aging and the Generational Economy, writes in CHINA DAILY:




Since the beginning of economic reform in 1978, changes in age structure have been very favorable in China. Because of the decline in the birth rate, only partly a consequence of the family planning policy, the number of children in China has decreased and the proportion of the population that is of working age increased. This led to a demographic dividend in China that provided an important boost to efforts to increase economic growth. Experts disagree about the size of the demographic dividend, but scholar Wang Feng and I believe that it added about 1.3 percentage points to economic growth between 1978 and 2000, smaller than some have argued, but still an enormous effect. READ MORE.