ABSTRACT
Everything changes with time, place, and condition. Studies on the association between population and economic growth in the 20th century have mostly been concerned with changes in the number of people. Now that the Chinese population has entered the post-demographic transition with new changes in the population of working age, the impact of the changes on socioeconomic development has attracted growing attention.
After the post-demographic transition passed the Lewis turning point, the comforting side is that the population benefits and bonuses in the post-golden age would last for another 15 years or so; on the other side, however, the benefits and bonuses have been declining, which must be faced, and to get ready for and deal with it, reforms must be advanced to explore a new path of economic development that seeks quality and benefits instead of speed.
A medium-high to medium growth of the economy in the next decade is reasonable planning for economic development. A speed in this range may help us stride over the medium-income trap and keep the unemployment rates in control while at the same time offering a comfortable and favorable ecologic environment for the economy to transform its development mode and adjust its structure. Therefore, maintaining a medium while trying to reach a medium-high speed of economic growth is a reasonable pursuit in the economic new normal.
Therefore, the window of the economic slowdown cannot be missed, and we must make a priority of technological advancement and production to reach a new level of economic efficiency, benefits, quality, and structure, which will then promote the healthy development of the economic new normal.
The golden age of the structural changes in population age before 2010 provided population profits and bonuses, which provided considerable support to the super-high growth of the labor-intensive economy and made immense contributions to the development in the first 30 years of the Reform and Opening Up. Now the post-golden age has given us a new demographic window for transitioning the development engines and mode and the economic structure and a favorable demographically ecological environment for the healthy development of the economic new normal and economic growth, the impact of which is all-around, far reaching, and sustainable.
The Chinese economy has a new normal, which offers new opportunities for comprehensively deepening the structural reform of the economy and delivers a new phase of economic transition and upgrade that seeks quality and benefits instead of growth speed. Corresponding tactics and strategies of economic development should be made. Economic quality and benefits instead of speed may lead the economy to develop in a healthy, coordinated, and sustainable way, improve the quality of development, and boost reforms that change the development mode, adjust the economic structure, and benefit people’s lives.
