China’s two-child policy has failed to make any impact on the country’s low birth rate as the number of new-borns dropped by two million last year and the decline is expected to continue, a media report said on Wednesday.
China ended its decades-old one-child policy in 2016 and permitted couples to have two children as the population of elderly rose with declining numbers of young people.
China had more than 230.8 million people aged 60 or above at the end of 2016, 16.7 per cent of the country’s total population, the Ministry of Civil Affairs had said in August 2017.
Chinese demographers said that the number of new-borns in 2018, the third year after the country fully implemented the two-child policy, may have dropped by more than two million and the birth population will continue to fall, state-run Global Times reported on Wednesday.
“Although the national data for the birth of new-borns have not been publicised yet, data revealed by local health departments showed that the number of new-borns in 2018 decreased by at least 15 per cent from the previous year,” He Yafu, a demographer and author of a book on the impact of China’s population policy, told the daily.
“The birth population in 2017 was 17.23 million. Based on current calculations, the number of new-borns across the nation might drop by more than two million,” He said.
After China implemented the comprehensive two-child policy, the country’s health authority predicted that the fertility rate in 2017 and 2018 would be 1.97 and 2.09 respectively.
They predicted that the number of new-borns in 2018 would be 7.90 lakh more than in 2017.
