Thread by @davidfickling

Will China's switch to a three-child policy reverse imminent population decline and knock-on effects throughout the world?

@anjani_trivedi, @ClaraDFMarques, @Moss_Eco and I will be on @TwitterSpaces at 9pm NY Thursday/9am HK Friday to discuss. Here's a quick introductory 🧵:

@anjani_trivedi @ClaraDFMarques @Moss_Eco @TwitterSpaces China this week announced that all families would be allowed to have up to three children, after a previous relaxation of its four-decade-old one-child policy in 2015 failed to spark a sustained increase in births:

globaltimes.cn/page/202105/12…

@anjani_trivedi @ClaraDFMarques @Moss_Eco @TwitterSpaces It's hardly surprising that the 2015 measures failed. Even countries without China's legacy of extreme anti-natalist policies struggle to lift fertility rates once they fall below replacement levels of 2.1 births per mother.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

@anjani_trivedi @ClaraDFMarques @Moss_Eco @TwitterSpaces Part of the decline in birth rates is just a result of people having children later. Women over 30 in rich countries nowadays have kids at about the same rate as they did in the 1950s.

@anjani_trivedi @ClaraDFMarques @Moss_Eco @TwitterSpaces That said, something unique seems to be happening in some of China's neighbours.

While fertility rates seem to have stabilized in Europe, they keep falling in the four "Tiger economies".

With Macau, they make up the bottom five places globally, with Japan not far behind

If China is heading in the same direction, that creates several potential problems. As @ClaraDFMarques wrote last month, population ageing will only exacerbate the yawning gender and urban-rural divides within China:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

@ClaraDFMarques India is set to overtake in terms of population within the next five years or so.

That seems to be causing official jumpiness about reporting demographic data now that China is at or close to decline.

@ClaraDFMarques This @FT piece in April arguing population was already in outright decline provoked a furious response from state media. But even the official numbers show the population is peaking very soon, far earlier than previous expectations of a late-2020s date.

ft.com/content/008ea7…

@ClaraDFMarques @FT It's a problem far beyond China's own shores, though. As @Moss_Eco argues here, the low-inflation, high-growth Goldilocks global economy of recent decades owes much to the benefits of outsourcing to a China whose labour force:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

@ClaraDFMarques @FT @Moss_Eco That workforce is now in likely permanent decline. China's workforce shrinks each year by more than the EU and Japan put together, and it's only going to accelerate.

@ClaraDFMarques @FT @Moss_Eco After all, the first generation of one-child children born in the early 1980s are starting to age out of their child-bearing years and the last generation of children born before the one-child policy are edging towards retirement age.

@ClaraDFMarques @FT @Moss_Eco One thing China can do about this is start making life easier for families, in particular mothers.

Part of this comes down to childcare, schooling, and parental leave, but there need to be revolutions in social attitudes, too, as Clara writes:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

@ClaraDFMarques @FT @Moss_Eco China performs better than some other Asian countries in terms of equality around household chores, but it's still well behind rich countries which have started to avert declining fertility rates:

@ClaraDFMarques @FT @Moss_Eco It's also one of the many countries where provision for paternity leave is inadequate, placing more of the upfront burden of child-rearing upon mothers, as @anjani_trivedi has written:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

@ClaraDFMarques @FT @Moss_Eco @anjani_trivedi In all these areas, one of the underlying issues is that China's one-child policy has given it rich-country demographic challenges at a point when it's not yet rich.

@ClaraDFMarques @FT @Moss_Eco @anjani_trivedi Declining birth rates aren't necessarily the worst thing in the world. As Dan has written, Singapore has a potentially attractive future ahead of it as a country that's smaller and richer, a path that Japan has already trod: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

@ClaraDFMarques @FT @Moss_Eco @anjani_trivedi As recently as February, Indonesia announced its own version of China's one-child policy with a plan to cut the fertility rate to replacement levels of 2.1 by 2025: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

South Korea, which is starting to see its population decline too, is beginning to wrestle with the same issues: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

In global terms, too, declining fertility rates are probably a good thing.

One tragic reason that people in poor countries tend to have bigger families is infant mortality.

If you expect some of your children to die before adulthood you need more to hit your ideal family size.

In that sense, part of the global decline in fertility is a good sign that people have the health and wealth to have the families they want, rather than the ones that fate and exigencies force on them.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Only part of it, though. Anecdotally, there seems to be plenty of evidence that people in many rich countries are having fewer kids than they'd like because of the stress and expense involved.

Add to that the legal hurdles raised in China and you have a potent anti-natalist brew. No country whose population has fallen below replacement levels of 2.1 births per mother has rebounded far above it. I wouldn't bet on China doing any better.

Please join @anjani_trivedi, @ClaraDFMarques, @Moss_Eco and myself on @TwitterSpaces at 9pm NY time Thursday/9am HK time Friday to join the discussion! (ends)