Scrapping the one-child policy won't boost China's birth rate

Beijing's one-child policy is abhorrent. But its critics are guilty of gross exaggeration. Despite what they claim, the effect of the one-child policy on China's population and economy has been small.

Beijing's heavy-handed approach to family planning is in the news again after local officials in Shaanxi forced a seven-months pregnant woman to have an abortion because she already had a child.

But it isn't grotesque outrages like the Shaanxi case that worry Beijing's policy advisers so much as the supposed demographic effects of the one-child policy.

According to conventional wisdom, the one child per family limit, imposed back in 1979 by Beijing, was a desperate attempt to slow China's ballooning population growth. It may have been harsh, but over the subsequent decades it prevented hundreds of millions of extra births, successfully averting a Malthusian catastrophe and paving the way for China's economic boom.

Now, however, academics are beginning to worry that the policy has been too effective at suppressing China's birth rate. Unless people are allowed to have more babies soon, they warn that the country's labour force will plummet in future years and that China will not be able to support its rapidly ageing population as the current generation of workers reaches retirement.

They are certainly right that China's fertility rate is low. In the late 1960s, the average woman could expect to bear six children over the course of her lifetime. By 2010, that number had plunged to just 1.6, well below the 2.1 rate needed to maintain population numbers.