Fourth Edition of Insight China Held in Shanghai Go back »
2013-07-03 | Shanghai
Dr. Wang Feng, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing, Professor Cai Yong, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, and Prof. Harry X. Wu, Director of Economic Research at The Conference Board China Center, and Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University, gave an update on China’s population development and its implication on labor force growth, consumer market, innovation as well as public spending.
The challenge to China is that its starting level is lower than other countries with ageing populations. The tremendous demographic changes bring huge burdens of supporting the elderly. In addition, its resource-intensive growth model will no longer be sustainable. All three speakers agreed that the population policy has created more problems than it tries to solve, and without reforms, there is now not much room for a faster growth of output per labor to fill the gap.
