Yuan Xin: Now the mainstream fertility population is post-00s and post-90s, and the average fertility intention of post-90s is 1.58 children

Phoenix Net Finance News On June 27, Phoenix Net Finance and the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University jointly held the "2023 Summer Davos Phoenix Network Wutong Night Talk and Tsinghua Economic Management Night" exchange dinner, sincerely inviting people from the political, business and academic circles to gather together to conduct in-depth discussions on the theme of "scientific and technological change and industrial future", Mengniu provided designated milk for this dinner.

Yuan Xin, professor of the School of Economics of Nankai University and vice president of the Chinese Mouth Society

Yuan Xin, professor of the School of Economics of Nankai University and vice president of the Chinese Mouth Society, said at the dinner that demography further studies the size, structure, quality, migration and distribution of the population.

First of all, in terms of scale, 9.56 million births and 10.41 million deaths in 2022, a negative increase of 850,000, is the first year of normalized negative growth of Chinese. Some people say will the population rise again? It is possible, but the general trend still goes down, decreases. The reason is simple: first, there are fewer people living people. Women of childbearing age aged 15-49 will decrease from 340 million today to 220 million in the middle of this century, and Chinese mothers are basically 20-34 years old, and women in this age group will probably decrease from 140 million to 80 million to 90 million. Among them, the lower the age of the birth cohort has the lower the willingness to have children, now the main fertility population is the post-00s and post-90s, the average fertility intention of the post-90s is 1.58 children, and the average fertility intention of the post-00s is 1.48 children. The law is the same all over the world, when fertility intention becomes fertility behavior, the actual fertility rate is generally declining, the fertility level of the 2020 census is only 1.30, which is lower than the fertility intention of the post-90s and post-00s, and lower than the average fertility intention of women of childbearing age in 2021 of 1.67. The fertility rate has continued to decline in the past two years.

Under this premise, Yuan Xin mentioned many people's worries, that is, whether the decline of population will endanger the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. "I give an absolute bottom line data today, 28 years from now to 2050, if none of us are born, just die, 10.41 million will die in 2022, how many will die by 2050?" About 16 million people - 17 million people, the average annual number of deaths in 28 years is 14 million - 15 million, adding up to about 400 million. The current total population of 1.4 billion minus 400 million, and there will be another 1 billion in 2050, so as long as there are children, the total population in 2050 will be more than 1 billion people. According to the United Nations, assuming a future fertility rate of 1.4-1.5, the total population will be more than 1.3 billion in 2050, and even if the fertility rate drops to 0.8-0.9, the total population will be more than 1.2 billion in 2050. So, by the middle of this century, the size of the total population is a fundamental feature of the population. The 20th National Congress also pointed out that Chinese-style modernization is a modernization with a huge population. Hara said.

In terms of raising the fertility rate of the population, Yuan Xin said that if there are no problems today and small problems tomorrow, this does not mean that there are no major problems the day after tomorrow, and we must start from now and make sustained efforts to prevent major problems the day after tomorrow. If the fertility rate remains at an average of 1.4-1.5 children, there will only be more than 700 million people left in China by 2100; If the fertility rate remains at 0.9-1.0 children (i.e. relative to the 2022 fertility level), there will be less than 500 million people by 2100; If 1.8 children can be born, which is equivalent to the moderate fertility rate planned by the state, there will be 1.1 billion people - 1.2 billion people by 2100. Therefore, the population changes in the early stage of the era of negative population growth are mild, and the population changes in the long stage are drastic, which is the law of population development. The fertility rate determines the future population trend, and whether the fertility rate can be stimulated is a major model and the largest livelihood. Tackling fertility must start now.

The second is demographics. Aging is a systemic and structural change in the all-age population, in fact, the population born in 2023 will become 60 years old by 2083, which means that the elderly before 2083 have all lived in this world, and the scale of the future annual size depends only on one indicator: how to die. Life expectancy is longer than generation, and the life expectancy of those born now is likely to live to 100 years, and life expectancy will only increase. Looking at the elderly population, the elderly population and aging level will double from the level of 260 million and 18.7% in 2020 to 520 million and more than 40% by mid-century, entering a super-aging society. Looking at the labor force population, the working-age population is 15-59 years old, the highest retirement age is now 60 years old, the population size is now about 890 million, and there will be 630 million by the middle of this century. Compared with all the developed countries at that time combined, we were about 10 million to 20 million more than it was.

In this sense, the lack of labor is a value judgment, and it must also be measured from both the supply and demand sides. "Let me give you an example, Universal ETC has laid off about 70% of fee-paying employees. Some people only do one thing from the age of 18 to their 40s - charge, so what is he going to do? What can he do? Now when it comes to mass innovation and entrepreneurship, what do they take to create? Where is the capital for their startup? There is a small restaurant in the Beijing Winter Olympics, ordering to passing food to closing are robots, if it is further popularized, how much labor will be replaced? When we come to Tianjin to open the Davos Forum, we can see that the subway is being built everywhere, but can we see the workers? Invisible, because large machines like shield machines have largely replaced workers. In the era of technology and digitalization, such substitution has already occurred in our lives, and the future will be more frequent and large-scale, will there really be a shortage of labor in the future? My attitude, labor supply and demand are falling at both ends, depending on who falls fast, employment pressures will persist for a long time. Hara said.

When talking about the impact of education on the quality of the population, Yuan Xin said that in the development of education in the past 40 years, the average number of years of education in Chinese has increased from 5.7 years in 1982 to nearly 10 years now. In other words, the retirement age remains unchanged, the age to enter the labor market is getting later and later with the improvement of education, and the age of exiting the labor market has not changed, resulting in the development of education shortens the working years in the life cycle, and what can be done is very simple, that is, the second half of the life extension pure consumption time into production time, that is, delayed retirement.

In the next 30 years, the elderly population will double in the context of an aging population, and now 35% of Japan's population is over 60 years old, and the elderly population is only more than 40 million. In the context of China's huge population size, 60-69 years old low-collar elderly are the main object of delayed retirement, now 150 million people, by 2050 to increase to 210 million, the number is increasing, in the fastest aging period precisely has the characteristics of young aging, which provides a window of opportunity for delayed retirement, to seize this window period, wait until the second half of this century to implement delayed retirement, the effect will be very poor.

When talking about the quality of the population, Yuan Xin frankly said that the improvement of quality is not an overnight thing. Every year's government work report says: steady growth, ensure employment. The scale of education depends on the structure and quality of education. News such as the delivery of the Master of Philosophy also shows the structural problems of graduate training, the lack of matching between the majors of graduates trained by universities and the majors needed by the market, and the different quality of students trained by different types of universities are all major events that need urgent reform. We have entered the era of 20 million annual enrollment and graduation of college students, and quality and structure are more important on the basis of scale. At present, there are 240 million college graduates in the total population, accounting for 17% of the total population, and on average, there is one college student in every six people, and in the early days of reform and opening up in 1982, we only had 6.25 million college students, accounting for only 0.6% of the total population.

When it comes to domestic migration and migration, Yuan Xin gave an image elaboration: in 2021, the total floating population will be 384 million, accounting for more than 27% of the total population, and one in every four people will move freely on 9.6 million square kilometers of land, which not only activates its own labor potential, improves the labor participation rate and labor productivity of the labor force, but also revitalizes the demand for labor for urban and rural development, and promotes a better match between labor allocation and economic development pattern. But at the same time, we must see ahead of time that now 16 provinces in China have begun to have negative population growth, and when there are more and more provinces with negative population growth, where does the migration of labor come from? Where does the source of the population come from? In the near future, we can also see the activity of labor migration and mobility, which is not a solution to the problem of low fertility in the long run. Therefore, in the final analysis, it is still necessary to find ways to stimulate fertility, and only fertility is the driving force that determines future population changes.