2024 picks: Why more babies won’t fix China

You would have thought with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, China wouldn’t be too worried about the number of people living there declining a bit. But as it faces the challenges of an economic slowdown and an ageing society, Beijing is urging families to have more babies to stop a population decline that’s been recorded for a second year in a row.  But is a falling birth rate necessarily a bad thing?  First published 26 February 2024.  Featured:  Stuart Gietel-Basten, Professor of Social Science and Public Policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology