Despite vastly different population densities, both China and the United States are suffering imminent negative population growth, although for very different reasons.
The number of births in the United States fell by 4% in 2020 to 3.61 million, the lowest number since 1979 and continuing a seven-year fall, according to a Bloomberg News report May 5. This will be above the number of deaths but by only 200,000 or less. Fertility rates fell for women in every single age group from 15 to 54 years. The drop in births ranged from 3% for Hispanic women to 8% for non-Hispanic Asian women.
There is one survey by Ovia Health, a women’s health technology firm, which estimates that anxiety about the lack of employment and lack of economic wherewithal to raise children, and fears of mother and/or baby contracting COVID during pregnancy or childbirth in a hospital, were major factors in the birth decline – but again, it has been underway nearly a decade, and merely accelerated in 2020. Clearly the economic conditions for family formation were already collapsing before the pandemic.
There are some reports that China’s population actually declined in 2020, although they come from sources of very hostile publications such as the London Financial Times. But already in 2019 the number of births fell by 580,000 to 14.65 million – still three and one-half times the number in the United States. China’s census data completed in December 2020 have not yet been released, so the idea of an absolute population decline can’t be confirmed.
The problem in China, despite strong physical-economic growth and – until 2020 – plentiful jobs growth, is the long-term effect of the one-child, then two-child limit on children per couple over a period of decades, clearly being lifted now as child-bearing is being encouraged and incentives created. Because of the previous limits, the number of women of child-bearing age is artificially low.
Both nations’ labor forces are growing at a slower and slower rate, with China’s being near zero growth and the United States at about 0.5%/year, according to the United Nations. A separate PBoC report (http://www.pbc.gov.cn/redianzhuanti/118742/4122386/4122692/4214189/4214314/2021032517454985842.pdf ) estimated China’s GDP growth could drop to 5.1%/year by 2025 from this cause.
