[MUSIC] Hi, in this module, I'm going to talk about Population Aging in China. Population Aging is one of the big topics for social science research on China right now. For the past few decades, China has been fortunate in that its age composition has been conducive to rapid economic growth. Essentially, since the 1980s and especially since the 1990s until just recently, there were relatively, as a share of the population, relatively few very young people and very elderly people and a lot of working-age adults. These are people that help staff the factories that helped power China's economic growth in recent decades. The reason for this fortunate age composition is that birth rates have been low since at least 1980. So basically, relatively few young people feeding into the population in the last few decades, so fewer dependent young people. Meanwhile, until recently, the share of the population that was elderly was fairly small because decades ago when the current elderly population was born, China's population was much smaller. So we have a relatively small share of the population that was elderly and had complex needs for healthcare and needs for pension and so forth. Now this gives some insight into what has been happening in the last two decades. Let's a look at birth and death rates. So the real drama here is in birth rates. As we can see, birth rates fell right around 1980 and they've stayed low. So again, for now, more than 30 years, we've had relatively small numbers of young people feeding into the population. But we had higher birth rates before that, especially in the 60s. And those were the people that as they got older were working-age in the late 1980s and the 1990s and a little bit later. These were the people that, again, helped drive China's economic growth. In this figure, we see what's been going on in recent years with the share of the population in China that is elderly. Again, as I mentioned, there've been fewer young people coming into the population. And meanwhile, actually death rates at advanced ages have been falling, so we have more people surviving to old age. So, just in the space of a few decades, the percentage of the population that's age 65 and above has risen. And as of 2014, it was nearly 10%. And it's going to continue to increase. This says a number of consequences, as we move forward and we see China's population increasing in age. Right now, the number of working-age adults has stabilized and even within the next two years, it's going to be falling. The average age of the population is increasing. The share of the population that is elderly will continue to rise rapidly over the next few decades. As the ratio of the population that is elderly increases, this poses a lot of challenges. Taking care of the elderly is going to be difficult. Not just for the government and society, but for families. Working-age adults may be in a situation where they are taking care of perhaps their two older parents. Or, further on down the road, perhaps even four elderly grandparents. And then, because the numbers of working-age adults is stable or falling, we see in some parts of the country, labor shortages emerging. And this will intensify over the next few decades. It's a big problem and a big challenge for China's economy. This just summarizes some of the trends we expect over the next few decades in the composition of China's population. As you can see, the share of the working-age population between 15 and 59 is going to be dropping steadily. Meanwhile, the share of the population that is 16 or above is going to rise rapidly for the next few decades. And meanwhile, the numbers of very young people will decline relatively slowly. But it's this increase in the numbers of the elderly that are really the big challenge. How do we take care of that many people? What are the implications for adults having to take care of parents? What is the implication for pension systems for the healthcare system? These are all central problems that China will have to face over the coming decades. And there's a lot of social science research ongoing right now where people are trying to better understand both what has happened in recent years and what may happen in the coming decades.