A New Look at Economic Pressure from Population Aging and Countermeasures Using the Sixth National Census Data

Abstract

Age-specific demographic data from China’s Sixth National Census (referred to as Sixth Census hereinafter) and from the UN Population Projections for 2010 may both reflect the real situation to differing degrees (but the Sixth Census data probably conforms more closely to reality), and as such both are of important reference value in calculating and discussing economic pressure from population aging and countermeasures in China. In this paper, we comprehensively reexplore the economic pressure from population aging and countermeasures in China using the Sixth Census data, on the basis of a previous comprehensive exploration of this issue using the UN population projections. We found that the economic pressure from population aging is greater when calculated using the Sixth Census data than that using the UN projections. Calculated using the Sixth Census data, economic pressure from population aging in China at its peak may be 3.2 times the 2010 value, and will be rare among the world’s 33 most developed economies and other G20 nations. Calculations using both sets of data indicate that the peak of economic pressure from aging will arrive in 2040 or so, with the period of greatest sustained pressure being from 2035 to 2045. Calculations using the Sixth Census data indicate that a greater degree of relaxing of current fertility policies will be necessary to strike a strategic balance between the pressure of population size and the pressure of population aging, and that a medium-high degree of gradually relaxing current fertility policies can both effectively mitigate future economic pressure from population aging in China and maintain the pressure from total population size within acceptable bounds.