China's population suffers gender imbalance

China's "missing girls" make it much harder for the country to keep its population stable, according to Carl Haub, demographer at the Washington-based Population Research Bureau. In recent decades, China has produced only 80 baby girls for every 100 baby boys.

Population growth in China is a concern for policy makers because the working-age population peaked in 2012, so the country faces having fewer workers available to support a growing army of the elderly. That peak has come at an earlier stage than in neighbouring economies, lending weight to the opinion of some observers that "China will become old before it gets rich".
Demographers consider that to keep the population from falling, each woman, on average, must produce 2.06 babies, or an average of one daughter each. While males slightly outnumber females at birth everywhere, they are more likely to die in infancy.
But women in China would need to produce 2.2 children each to keep population level. That is because the nation's gender imbalance is among the highest in the world, with 1.17 boys for every girl, a level that demographers have warned could lead to social unrest in years to come. Even China's neighbours such as South Korea and Japan, which have fertility rates of 1.23 and 1.34 per woman, do not need as high a birth rate to hold the population level.
Indeed, recent data from China's census suggest it is having even fewer children than suggested by UN statistics, which show a birth rate of 1.6 children per woman over the course of her child-bearing years. But China's own census puts the rate as of 2010 at 1.08, almost the world's lowest.
The calculation of the number of births needed to stop population from falling is derived from the UN Population Division's "instant-replacement calculation", which takes account not only of the rate of births but also maternal deaths.
Mr Haub noted that there were several countries with significantly higher instant-replacement rates than China, including Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Nigeria, where seven out of every 10 women would need to have three children for population stability. But in those countries, female life expectancy is much shorter on average because women are much more likely to die young. Average female life expectancy in Nigeria is 53 years compared with 75.6 years in China.
This month, China announced it was modifying its "one-child policy" to allow urban couples to have two children if only one parent, rather than both, was an only child

Source: CNN