| Its now dropping even lower in 2023, long after the lockdowns have ended. Turns out the East Asian style of hyper-competitive child rearing has its downsides, namely the high costs dissuade parents from having children altogether. China faces every antinatal problem the west does, except far worse. 1. Extremely high housing prices making family formation expensive 2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (Seen in Europe) 3. General collapse of marriage rates due to changing incentives and thus moral norms 4. Higher education decreasing fertile years. 5. Economic depression, especially for young people, euro debt crisis level of youth unemployment. You add to that, that China still officially has a 3-child policy (not that many people even have 2), because the birth control bureaucrats still need a job. China is probably 2nd lowest in the world behind South Korea, and will stay there, if not |
Scott Galloway (and others, like Elizabeth Warren) have been saying this, about the US, repeatedly: US education costs rose (or at least, were allowed to rise by the politicians who were nominally regulating them) by 1400% since the 1970s [https://www.profgalloway.com/inflated/]. This was not sensible policy but if GDP growth via financialization of (third-level) education etc. is your economy's chosen indicator, it's what you get.
Anyway the low TFR is not necessarily a demographic crisis, it's up to the country whether it lets its population decrease (Japan, China), or uses immigration to sustain whatever its target population growth is (US, Canada, EU, SG, Aus).
> 2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (seen in Europe)
You're getting the direction of causality wrong: apartment size was a reaction to the decrease. Contraception, more years of education and other social changes were the drivers of smaller apartment sizes, not the effect.