Population Expert: China's One-Child Forced-Abortion Policy Hurts Economy

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Population Expert: China's One-Child Forced-Abortion Policy Hurts Economy
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
June 16, 2008

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- An American expert on population issues says the policy China has in place allowing families to have just one child and punishing them with forced abortions and sterilizations when they violate it is hurting the nation's economy. The Chinese policy may be costing its economy billions of dollars.
Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, presented that analysis at a lecture at the Heritage Foundation on Friday.
"By eliminating a couple of hundred million people, China has made itself poorer," Mosher told the Cybercast News Service after the talk.
"If you crunch the numbers and assume China's economy will continue to grow at the current rate, you see that every baby born in China will add several thousands of dollars to the Gross National Product (GNP) over the course of his or her lifetime," he explained.
"The opposite is also true," Mosher added, according to CNS News. "Every birth that is prevented marks a reduction of several thousands of dollars in the GNP over the coming years. Every birth the government in China stops represents a financial blow to the Chinese."
The one-child family planning policy has already produced a labor shortage problem across the nation.

Last year, Prof Zhang Yi from the Institute of Population and Labour Economics, told Asia News that the one-child policy has produced an effect where fewer rural workers are going into cities to work.
As a result, ironic labor shortages are beginning to appear in the coastal regions because there are not enough people to work.

“In the beginning, it was believed that our big population would be a hindrance to our economic development. But over the past decades, experience has told us otherwise,” he said.
“Japan, for instance, has little in the way of resources and boasts one of the highest population densities in the world, but it is a thriving economy and one of the richest nations. Labour is the most important source of wealth," Zhang said.
Meanwhile, Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute forecasted more labor shortages for China for the future.
"Thanks to decades of sub-replacement fertility--a consequence at least in part of Beijing's relentless and coercive birth control program--China's population growth stands to decelerate sharply, and its society to age dramatically, over the coming generation," he explains.
"In 2025, furthermore, China's 15-64 labor force will have been shrinking in total size for more than a decade," he said.