Chinas Demographic Limits to Economic Growth

• Main Author: Truesdell, David M.
• Other Authors: Barma, Naazneen
• Published: Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/7421

China's demographic transition will create great difficulty in continuing the scale of the economic development seen over the last thirty years. This difficulty will be experienced through the costs of the demographic detour, which began during the Great Leap Forward and was then magnified through the birth limiting campaigns up to and including the One-Child Policy. While the skewing of the dependency ratio over the last thirty years resulted in significant contributions to Chinas economic development, this has reached a limit where the unborn laborers will present a strain on development. This strain will be present in the form of a shrinking and rapidly aging labor pool resulting in a decrease in innovation and productivity as well as an overhaul to thousands of years of tradition of doing business through familial ties. This will all be culminated in the testing of an already failing pension system as China experiences the transition from the demographic stage of a slowly growing population to post-transition.