Vietnam scraps two-child policy as it tackles falling birthrate
GuardianJUN 2
Decades of thoughtful population stewardship have blessed Vietnam with a golden demographic dividend — 67.5% working-age citizens fueling remarkable growth. Yet this triumph teeters on a knife's edge: fertility at 1.96 children per woman. The architects of success must now become masters of delicate transition, or risk squandering their masterwork.
Decades of draconian population controls — dismissing state workers for third children, expelling Party members for "excess" births — have engineered Vietnam into a demographic trap. Now, with fertility plummeting to 1.91 children per woman, the authoritarian architects of family limitation confront their own creation: a nation racing toward demographic collapse.
There is a 50% chance that 4.8 communist states will be there in 2050, according to the Metaculus prediction community.