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Notes -
I don't think this is entirely true – my understanding is that a lack of population growth is considered a contributor to the decline of the Roman Empire, and I suspect (although I haven't put intense study into the issue) that similar factors may have contributed to poor French performance in the Second World War as well. I think there are distinguishing factors in all of these cases, but to the extent that we have historical analogies, they give us cold comfort.
And yet it is unable to employ all of those workers – the United States has a better youth employment rate than China (even after China "recalculated" their data to make it look better). Perhaps you and Faceh are focusing on the wrong Chinese employment problem.
There is something to the French case, but modern fertility collapse is uncharted territory in that it happens globally, for new reasons, in conditions of rapidly rising productivity via technological progress. I do not believe that “this country has higher TFR”, alone, is now predictive of much of anything, except the population age structure itself.
Fair enough, and yes, this goes to show that they're not on the verge of economic decline through labor shortages.
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