Taps Coogan – January 18th, 2022

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The following chart, from Bloomberg, highlights the looming demographic crisis in China.

There were just 10 million live births in China in 2020, less than during the Great Famine.

How few is 10 million births? Back of the envelope math says that a country with 10 million babies per year and an average life span of 77 years should converge towards a population somewhere in the ballpark of 600 million people, depending on the exact death rate of the various age cohorts. China’s current population is 1.4 billion, more than twice that. By comparison, India had 24 million births in 2020, a number more inline with its population – and China’s.

China also has a net emigration rate of about 0.25% of the population per year, a problem that its turn back to harder-core Marxism is likely to exacerbate.

To make matters worse, if you were going to design the worst possible economy for a country with a rapidly shrinking population, it would be one powered by real-estate construction. Fewer people need fewer homes, less office space, and less retail space.

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