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Lyman Stone
Lyman Stone
Lyman Stone is an economist who specialises in population change. He is an adviser at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.

For China, lifting birth restrictions is no guarantee of a baby boom as long working hours come at the price of long-term population growth. When parents can spend quality time with their children and not be consumed by stress, fertility rates will rise.

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While pro-natal policies may help remove some obstacles to a higher birth rate, policymakers will find it harder to persuade women to have more babies when they simply don’t want to, possibly because they themselves are from small families.