(WASHINGTON POST)  Matt O’Brien October 29, 2015 — China is Schrödinger’s economy. If you look at its statistics, it seems fine. But if you look at what its government is doing, it does not.

Perhaps the biggest move came early Thursday morning, when China announced it was ending its 36-year-old one-child policy. The move was a clear sign the government is worried about a labor shortfall as the country ages and the birthrate slows. The country’s working age population fell 3.71 million in 2014, following smaller but still substantial declines in 2013 and 2012. The birthrate has been almost halved over the past 20 years. “Starting in two or three years, you’re going to see another substantial, precipitous drop in young labour entering the labor market,”  Wang Feng, an expert on Chinese demographics at the University of California Irvine and Fudan University in Shanghai, told the Financial Times earlier this year.

Source: Why China is ending its one-child policy – The Washington Post