Abstract
Our projection study demonstrated that, while the population in China will be aging at a rapid speed and to a huge scale, particularly the oldest-old aged 80+, Chinese family households will continue to contract to a substantially smaller average size in the next a few decades. The proportion of elderly households with at least one person aged 65+ will increase dramatically in China in the next few decades. By the years 2030 and 2050, the proportion of the elderly aged 65+ living in empty-nest households without children among the total population will be 2.5 and 3.7 times that in 2000. The increase in percentages of the oldest-old living in empty-nest households will be even more dramatic: 4 and 11.5 times as high as in 2000 for the years 2030 and 2050. These aging population structure problems – with respect to proportion of elderly and elderly households as well as proportion of elderly living in empty-nest households – will be much more serious in rural areas than in urban areas. This strongly suggests that, to avoid serious social problems in the future China needs to change its household registration policy which restricts free movement from rural to urban areas and to adopt policies encouraging rural-to-urban family migration or family reunion after young migrants settle down in urban areas.
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Notes
- 1.
Various provinces in China have already started to slightly relax the one-child policy, such as allowing couples with both parties who are an only-child (i.e., no siblings) to have two children.
- 2.
Although we did not find more recent survey data about the average ratio of total expenditures for the elderly to those for children, we believe that the average of these three survey estimates may be used as a reasonable approximation, as the recent increase in costs of child-rearing may be offset by the substantial increase of the elderly life span up to oldest-old ages which need more care.
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Zeng, Y., Land, K.C., Gu, D., Wang, Z. (2014). Household and Living Arrangement Projections in China at the National Level. In: Household and Living Arrangement Projections. The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis, vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8906-9_12
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