- China is one of the world’s most unaffordable places to raise a child, a Beijing think tank says.
- The cost of raising a child compared to GDP per capita is 6.3 times in China, but 4.11 in the US, it said.
- The cost of raising a child is sinking China’s already falling birth rate, the researchers said.
Just to note, immigration only works as long as there are source countries with high birth rates. Even those countries (many African ones) are seeing declines in their birthrate.
How do you figure that? If a country is a horrible place to be, and even has a replacement rate below 2.1 there a can be emigration far greater from that country with the population going elsewhere. Present day Venezuela is a good example of this.
I meant from a global perspective. A lot of people think falling birth rates in western countries are fine since they can sustain via immigration from countries with high birth rates. They generally don’t realise that the birthrate is falling globally, and then it’s just a matter of which country gets fucked first.
If you’re talking from the perspective of the survival of humanity, sure. However that’s far enough out that much larger factors (like climate change related war and famine) are going to threaten human growth long before the global replacement rate is an issue.
Oh yes, I fully agree. As I mentioned in my first comment the birthrate decline isn’t going to help us with any of the issues we’re currently facing, it’s just going to throw a bunch of new issues at us and most people don’t even realise that.
I think the distinction between our two perspectives is you are looking globally which blurs the lines and “smooths out” the problem a bit until everyone is experiencing problems, where I’m focusing on nation states. Some of which will be hit much much harder or much faster than other nations. Just a guess on my part, but the difference in countries feeling this could be separated by 3 generations or more. Some are countries experiencing it right now while other countries great grandchildren will be the first to experience it.