Sharp fall in marriages heightens China's concerns over Declining Birth Rate
The number of marriages in China last year dropped to a 36-year low, accentuating the world's second largest economy's demographic crisis as experts say this will add to the declining birth rate in the country.
A total of 7.63 million couples registered to get married across China in 2021, a record low for the past 36 years since 1986 when the Ministry of Civil Affairs started to release such statistics.The decline in the number of marriage registrations will inevitably result in the decline of the birth rate in China, since most children are born within marriages, He Yafu, an independent demographer told the state-run Global Times newspaper.
Early this year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said China's population grew by less than half a million last year to 1.4126 billion as the birth rate fell for the fifth consecutive year, stoking fears of a looming demographic crisis and its adverse impact on the country's economy in future. China's population increased by 480,000 in a year-on-year comparison from 2020 down from 12 million, as per the NBS data. Coupled with this, China now faces a continued decline in the number of marriage registrations. The numbers fell sharply over the past three years with less than 10 million couples getting married in 2019, less than nine million in 2020, and less than eight million marriage registrations in 2021.
The number of couples who tied the knot in 2021 was only 56.6 per cent of the figure in 2013 when the number of marriage registrations reached a peak, the report said.
(Source : The Pioneer)
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