Type | Conference Paper - United Nations Expert Group Meeting on Social and Economic Implications of Changing Population Age Structures |
Title | Demographic dividend and prospects for economic development in China |
Author(s) | |
Publication (Day/Month/Year) | 2007 |
URL | http://www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/Proceedings_EGM_Mex_2005/full_report.pdf#page=155 |
Abstract | During the last 25 years, the People’s Republic of China has undergone demographic as well as economic changes of historic proportions. Demographically, China has transformed itself from a "demographic transitional" society, where reductions in mortality led to rapid population growth and subsequent reductions in fertility led to a slower population growth, to a "post-transitional" society, where life expectancy has reached new heights, fertility has declined to below-replacement level, and rapid population ageing is on the horizon. In the not-too-distant future—in a matter of a few decades—China’s population will start to shrink, an unprecedented demographic turn in Chinese history in the absence of major wars, epidemics or famines. In this process, China will also lose its position as the most populous country in the world. Economically, China has completed its transition from a socialist, centrally-planned economy to a market-based economy. From a socialist economy that was closed to the outside world and plagued by low efficiency and stagnation, China has become, in the last two decades¸ one of the most dynamic and fast- growing economies in the world. In less than twenty years' time, between 1982 and 2000, China’s real GDP per capita, as adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP adjusted), quadrupled – a record unmatched elsewhere in the world.1 At the start of these historical transformations, China's leaders adopted the improvement of the standard of living of the Chinese population as its new political mandate and the basis for political legitimacy. They accordingly formulated two basic national policies: (i) developing the economy and (ii) controlling population growth. The Government of the People’s Republic of China announced its onechild-per-couple policy in 1980, an unprecedented act of governmental intervention in population. Such an extreme policy came about even though the fertility level in China had already more than halved during the previous decade, and was already at a level not much above the replacement level (Lee and Wang, 1999; Wang, 2005). The rationale for China’s one-child policy was a neo-Malthusian perspective on the relationship between population and development—a view largely dismissed by mainstream economists. While the architects of China’s population policy could argue that the country’s remarkable post-reform economic record presents an evidence of the success of the policy, this assertion could be questioned on two grounds. The first is the extent to which the transition to low fertility was accelerated by the one-child policy (Wang, 2005). The second, which is considered in this paper, is the extent to which the decline in fertility, the slowdown in population growth, and the changes in age structure contributed to China’s economic success. In light of the recent and future changes in China's age structure, the paper shall also examine and prognosticate on how changes in China’s population age structure can affect the country’s prospects for economic development during the rest of the twenty-first century. This paper is organized as follows. The first section reviews briefly the recent and projected changes in China’s population age structure. The second and third sections evaluate the impact of changes in the age structure on China’s economy in the past two decades and in the near future, respectively. The evaluations are based on calculations of two types of demographic dividends: (i) a dividend associated 142 with a relative increase in the population of the labour force age due to fertility decline and (ii) a dividend associated with population ageing (Mason and Lee, forthcoming; Wang and Mason, 2004). |
» | China - National Population Census 1982 |