Can China Reverse Its Population Decline? Just Ask Sweden

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/upshot/china-population-decline.html

By Andrew Jacobs and Francesca Paris, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: China’s population has begun to decline, a demographic turning point for the country that has global implications. ...China joined an expanding set of nations with shrinking populations caused by years of falling fertility and often little or even negative net migration, a group that includes Italy, Greece and Russia, along with swaths of Eastern and Southern Europe and several Asian nations like South Korea and Japan. ...History suggests that once a country crosses the threshold of negative population growth, there is little that its government can do to reverse it. ...Two decades ago, Australia tried a “baby bonus” program that paid the equivalent of nearly 6,000 U.S. dollars a child at its peak. At the time the campaign started in 2004, the country’s fertility rate was around 1.8 children per woman. (For most developed nations, a fertility rate of 2.1 is the minimum needed for the population to remain steady without immigration.) ...by 2020, six years after the program had ended, it was at 1.6 — lower than when the cash payments were first introduced....

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