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With economic development and social changes, more and more countries and regions are facing the challenge of declining birth rates. Recently, according to ABC and other foreign media reports, the number of births in the United States in 2023 will drop to the lowest level in more than 40 years, continuing the trend of declining birthrates in Americans in the past 20 years.
Preliminary data released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that the total number of births fell 2% to 3.59 million in 2023, the lowest number of births since 1979, when about 3.4 million babies were born in the United States. U.S. media said that many U.S. couples are willing to have two or more children, but they see housing, job security and childcare costs as significant barriers to having more children.
The report's lead author, Brady Hamilton, a demographer at the Center for Statistics, said the fertility rate among women of childbearing age in the United States is at its lowest level since the center began compiling statistics. Fertility rates are declining in many countries around the world, especially in wealthier countries, where events such as the economic situation and the uncertainty caused by pandemics have reduced people's willingness to have children.
Not only the United States, but also China is facing a similar situation:
- The number of births and the birth rate
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, from 2016 to 2022, the birth rate of the Chinese population has declined. Since 2017, China's birth population and birth rate have been declining year by year, and the birth rate has fallen below 10‰ after 2020. As of 2022, the birth rate of the Chinese population is only 6.77 per thousand.
Since 2017, the number and proportion of China's population aged 0-4 have declined. In 2022, the proportion of China's population aged 0-4 fell from 5.96% in 2017 to 4.31%, and the number of people aged 0-4 in mainland China also showed a downward trend.
- Fertility rate
Ning Jizhe, deputy head of the leading group for the seventh national census of the State Council and director of the National Bureau of Statistics, said that the preliminary summary results show that the total fertility rate of women of childbearing age in mainland China in 2020 is 1.3, which is already at a low level. The total fertility rate is the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. Under normal circumstances, the total fertility rate reaches 2.1 in order to complete the generational replacement and ensure that the overall population level is relatively stable. On the mainland, a reading below 1.5 means that it has fallen below the warning line.
The low fertility level is also a result of economic and social development, and the fertility level is affected not only by policy factors, but also by economic, social, cultural and other factors, and the influence of the latter is gradually increasing.
With the upgrading of consumption and the rapid development of the country's economy, the cost of having children is increasing, and the economic pressure that a family needs to bear is gradually increasing. Not only that, but after having a child, there is an even bigger problem in choosing someone to take care of the child. In the face of the normalized social phenomenon that both husband and wife have jobs, most of the tasks of taking care of children fall on the elderly at home, but the physical experience of the elderly is also limited, and the risk of hiring a nanny is greater; Coupled with the unwillingness of contemporary young people to sacrifice their time and experience, such as the "selfless dedication" spirit of the previous generation of parents is no longer advocated by the post-80s and 90s, these status quo are "persuading" contemporary young people to have the next generation.
Dr. Li Wei, professor of economics at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and vice dean of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, believes that some of the demographic problems encountered today can be solved through future technological improvements, including ChatGPT's various general types of artificial general intelligence (AI), which has a wide range of applications to replace some workers in production. Especially for countries with rapidly aging populations such as China and Japan, the future of pension is a big problem, because many pension services are manpower-intensive. How to solve this problem? In the future, there will be fewer and fewer young people and more and more old people, and we will need young people to do other work. Therefore, at this time, artificial intelligence, including some humanoid or non-humanoid robots, can play a very important role.
For the specific scheme of maternity subsidy, experts suggest that it should be distributed to families according to the number of children, and give 1,000-6,000 yuan per month to families with children. For example, a one-child subsidy of 1,000 yuan, a two-child family subsidy of 3,000 yuan, and a three-child family subsidy of 6,000 yuan. According to the above subsidy calculation, that is, the one-child family subsidy is 1,000 yuan, the two-child family subsidy is 1,500 yuan per child, and the three-child family subsidy is 2,000 yuan per child. According to this calculation, about 1-3 trillion subsidies need to be provided.
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