China may or may not overcome the challenges of negative population growth, high youth unemployment and an aging population by radically recalibrating its economic focus on innovations and high tech.

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.

  • megopie@beehaw.org
    1·
    10 months ago

    The health care and pension system are not Beijing’s, they are those of individual cities and provinces. The systems are highly localized, it’s be like as if states in the US ran Medicare and Social Security. This means it’s huge problem for poor interior provinces and probably manageable for rich costal ones.

    Benefits and services from such programs are limited to legal residents of an area but most people in the most productive economic areas are migrants and are not entitled to the benefits.

    Without major restructuring of these systems, hundreds of millions or retiring migrant workers are going to overwhelm their home provinces systems.