NewsWire: 2/18/21
- From 2019 to 2020, the number of registered newborns in China fell by 15%. The steep drop underscores the demographic headwinds facing the country, which has long struggled with a long-term birthrate decline. (Financial Times)
- NH: This is astonishing. We get our first look at the overall impact of the pandemic on births in China, and what we see is 10.04 million newborn babies registered in China in 2020, according to the Ministry of Public Security. That’s down 14.8% from 11.79 million in 2019.
- Demographers expected births to decline, as they have for the previous three years in a row. (See “China’s Birthrate: Lowest in 70 Years.”) And most expected the decline to accelerate under the impact of China's rigorous pandemic shutdowns. But as one researcher put it in the Financial Times, no one expected it to decline this much. A 15% drop in one year is unprecedented. To give some perspective, from 2018 to 2019, the number of births fell 4%. The previous record decline occurred in 2018, when the number of births fell 11.6% from 2017.
- The birth dearth hit some provinces and cities especially hard. Guangzhou, one of the largest cities in China, reported a 17% decline. Hefei, the capital and largest city of Anhui Province, saw a 23% decline. In Wenzhou, a major commercial hub, births fell 19%. Some smaller towns showed YoY declines of as much as 30%.
- An important caveat: The number of registered newborns isn’t the same as the actual number of births. The number of babies registered with the government is usually lower than the final tally, because some parents don’t register their children immediately. In 2019, there were 11.79 million babies registered and 14.65 million children born. China will release the official birthrate and birth statistics for 2020 in April through its National Bureau of Statistics.
- Even though these numbers aren’t “official,” they’re still a sobering glimpse at China’s accelerating demographic crisis. Covid-19 has undoubtedly exaggerated the decline, but remember, the earliest pandemic-era babies wouldn’t have started being born until nearly the end of the year, in November or December. For most of 2020, the pandemic was not a factor affecting how many babies were born. Unfortunately, the monthly data behind these stats aren’t available, so it’s not clear whether the drop reflects an extreme decline at the end of the year or was spread out over 2020. We’ll see what the next round of data shows in April.
