There’s a joke in here somewhere about Chinese children now having another china to play with but we’re better than that and so are you.

China’s one child only policy, fully implemented back in 1980, was put in place to curb their rapidly expanding population. Now the country has done an about-turn and couples will be able to have two children. The reasoning is simple, as explained by Business Insider:

There’s a one-word answer to why they’re now lifting the rule: Demographics.

The country now has a particularly poor dependency for an emerging market, with a large ageing population heading towards retirement, and not as many workers coming into the labour force.

From this year, the ratio of workers for each person either too young or too old to work (known as the dependency ratio) will begin to decline, limiting Chinese economic growth.

Since the rule was implemented the sex ratio at birth has become very skewed, as this graph below illustrates:

That brings with it another set of problems:

“Women are bearing only 0.71 girls over their lifetime, well below the replacement figure of just over unity. In 2010, there were 51m more men than woman in the country. The sex ratio among newborns is 120 boys for every 100 girls, the highest in the world (Figure 39). At this rate, there will not be enough brides for as many as one-fifth of today‟s baby boys when they get to marrying age, heightening the risk of social tensions.”

You can call it social tensions, or you can call it the alarming increase in rape and sexual assault when bachelors have been unable to find spouses.

Critics have long pointed at this system as being antiquated, so it is good to see what really is a case of ‘better late than never’.

[sources:businessinsider&businessinsider]