One of the biggest problems has been that the retiring elderly don't have enough of the younger generation to take over their jobs. The size of the retiring population prompted analysts to predict that there would be a drop of 3.25% of China's annual growth rate. While the uneven population demographics have made China look like a developed country, China has little in the way of most developed countries social welfare, which, you can imagine isn't a good thing to have happen.
Writing on a blog post for China Gaze, Kirsten Korosec of Smart Planet also pointed out
The country’s one-child policy initially provided an economic boost. China’s working age population rose in the past 20 years, pushing up incomes and productivity as young people headed into cities to work in factories. But the share of working-age folks has since declined and is expected to fall between 2010 and 2030 nearly as fast as in Japan, the U.S. and other developed, rich nations.
Not awesome. The good news is that as younger couples become wealthier, they are more inclined to have a second child should the reforms go through. Of 26,000 Weibo users surveyed, the vast majority responded that they would have more children, law permitting, some of the responses to the proposed reform were pretty lukewarm, citing rising living costs and the raging property bubble as other worries to consider when thinking about becoming a parent.
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