Short of Workers and Consumers, China Abandons One-Child Policy
- Policy change part of Xi Jinping's new five-year plan
- Shares of baby-formula maker Danone jump on news of change
Will Ending the One-Child Policy Benefit China's Economy?
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China ended one of the most ambitious demographic experiments in human history, abandoning the limit of one child for most families to foster the population growth required by the world’s second-biggest economy.
Introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to husband a then-impoverished nation’s scarce resources, the baby limit now threatens to undermine growth: the working-age population shrank last year for the first time in two decades and the cohort of senior citizens is projected to grow rapidly.