China’s Changing Population Structure and its Implications for US Agricultural Exports

Abstract

On May 11, 2021, China released the findings from its seventh national population census, which shows that its population totaled 1.41 billion in 2020 with an average annual growth rate of 0.053% since 2010, the lowest ten-year growth rate since its first population census in 1953. China’s population structure is also changing—a growing share of residents are older than 65 and the birth rate is declining. Specifically, China’s total new births sharply declined by around 18%, from 14.65 million in 2019 to 12 million in 2020, despite some skepticism that the birth rates might be overreported and the death rates may be underreported. On May 31, 2021, China announced that it will allow couples to have up to three children and will provide supportive measures to improve its population structure and to actively cope with an aging population after scrapping its decades-old one-child policy and adopting a two-child policy in 2016 (BBC 2021).

As one of the major destinations of US agricultural exports, China’s changing population structure and growing economic development have important implications for its agricultural and food import demand from the United States.