Population Policies of China, Singapore, and France

Population Policies

"Population policies are policies designed by the government to address problems of high or low birth rates", In this essay I will examine the population policies of three different countries, China, Singapore, and France. The aim of a population policy is to create a sustainable level of population, which means a level of population that will not harm the needs of future generations. This directly links to China because is is the country with the largest population in the world, and it is still growing rapidly. The continuation of these levels of birth would be a severe impairment on the needs of the future generations. Although some countries have problems in direct contrast to China's overcrowding issues, Some countries are too underpopulated to function healthily and therefore create policies encouraging people to have more children.

China is a large country in the northern hemisphere, located in the continent of Asia, And bordered by countries such as Mongolia and Vietnam. China currently has an anti-natal policy, which means there is a policy against having children. This started because China had an exponential population growth throughout the 1950's and 60's, And birth rates reached 5.8 per 1000 per year. This -induced the population policy being introduced in 1979-1980. The "One child policy" of china has become very well known over the years because it is the most drastic policy of its kind in today's world. The policy states that couple may only have one child, Although having two children is not illegal it means you do not get any state benefits, meaning you have to pay for all health care and education etc. So only the very rich can afford this. There are many problems with this policy though. The first is that there will be an ageing population, and therefore a high dependency rate. Also as couples are only allowed one child they prefer to have a boy, therefore there is a large gender imbalance in China today, for every 100 baby girls born there are 116 baby boys. This causes large scale emigration of young Chinese men looking for wives.

Singapore is a tiny island in Asia, bordered by Malaysia and Indonesia. Singapore started out as being anti-natalist in the mid 1960's with major worries of over population on this small island. But their anti-natalist campaigns were so successful that in the mid 1980's the government had to reverse the policy due to concerns of under population.