Rapidly ageing China to face labour shortfall by 2021:Experts

Rapidly ageing China may face a labour shortfall as early as 2021 besides gender imbalance as the three-decade old controversial one-child policy has begun to bite the manufacturing giant's labour resources, an expert warned today.
China's labour population will show a downward trend as workers born during the baby boom in the 1960-70s begin to retire in 2021, Yao Meixiong, deputy head of the Centre for Population Census of Fujian Provincial Bureau of Statistics said.
By the end of 2014, China had 212 million people aged above 60, accounting for 15.5 per cent of the total, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

"Young labour resources between the age of 20 to 34 will plunge year by year from 2021. The drop could amount to 11 million each year from 2022 to 2025. By 2030, the youth labour force at this rate will drop to 221 million, 32 per cent or 104 million fewer than 2010," state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Yao as saying.
He said the population under 14 years old only accounted for 16.5 per cent of the country's total, compared with the world's average of 27 per cent.
The population of workers aged between 16 and 59 shrank by 3.71 million year on year in 2014, official data showed.

Yao pointed out that a gender imbalance could also be problematic.

"For people less than 19 years old in 2010, 172 million were males, 22.1 million more than females. This means about 10 per cent of male youths will find it hard to find female spouses beginning in 2020," he said.
Officials say that about the one-child policy aimed at restricting the growth of the population has prevented over 400 million births.
China, the world's most populous country has over 1.357 billion population as of 2013 census. China partially lifted the one-child policy during a pilot programme in Zhejiang Province in January 2014, allowing couples to have a second child if either parent is an only child.

The policy expanded nationwide at the beginning of 2015.
However, Yao said the policy is not enough to fill the future labour shortfall as couples qualified to bear a second child are not always willing to do so.
Initial response to relaxation was not very enthusiastic due to parental worries about heavy expenditure.