The mainland's working-age population continued to fall last year as Beijing struggled to address a spiralling demographic challenge made worse by its one-child policy. The mainland's total population stood at 1.37 billion at the end of 2014, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, an increase of 7.1 million on the previous year. The working-age population, between 16 and 59, fell to 915.8 million last year, down 3.7 million from the end of 2013. While the shrinking labour pool is helping to prevent a rise in unemployment, it is also driving up labour costs and eroding the manufacturing and export competitiveness that helped fuel China's 30-year expansion. "It will clearly mean that in the coming 10 years, labour will contribute less to growth than it has done in the last two decades," said Louis Kuijs, Royal Bank of Scotland Group's chief greater China economist. Yuan Xin , a demographer at Nankai University in Tianjin , said China was unlikely to face an immediate labour shortage. However, Yuan said, China still faced rising challenges, such as how to improve the quality of its work force to meet the demands of its long-term goals of structural economic reforms. The population aged 60 and over, by contrast, rose last year by more than 10 million to 212.4 million, or 15.5 per cent of the total population. China introduced its controversial family planning policies, which limit most couples to only one child, in the 1970s to rein in population growth. The Communist Party moved to relax the rules in late 2013 to allow couples to have two children as long as at least one of the parents is an only child. Yet far fewer couples have applied to have a second child than expected. Nearly 116 boys were born for every 100 girls last year, while the gender ratio in the total population was 105 men to 100 women. Yuan said a great imbalance in gender would lead to a high divorce rate and dramatic increases in cases of sexual violence. It would also become a fiscal burden to the government, which had to care for bachelors after they retired, Yuan said. Additional reporting by Laura Zhou