As a result of the one-child policy the country, China’s fertility rate was well below 2 children per woman for more than three decades.

At the same time, according to the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute, the average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 in China stood at 485,000 yuan ($76,629) for a first child in 2019, almost seven times China’s per capita GDP that year ($10,144). The financial burden has many families thinking twice before adding members to their family.

Tomoyuki Fukumoto, a professor at Osaka University of Economics, predicted that “the decline in the working-age population is likely to reduce China’s growth by around 1 percentage point annually from 2035 to 2050.”