China has announced that couples will be permitted to have up to three children in a major policy shift from the existing two-child limit, after recent data showed a dramatic decline in births in China, the world’s most populated country.

“To actively respond to the ageing of the population…a couple can have three children,” state media Xinhua reported on Monday, citing a committee meeting hosted by President Xi Jinping.

Early this May, China reported the slowest population growth since the early 1960s, despite scrapping its one-child policy in 2015 to encourage more births and avoid a potential population crisis.

A once-a-decade survey showed that the overall population of China grew to 1,41178 billion in the 10 years to 2020, up by 5.38%. The increase reflects an average annual rise of 0.53%, down from 0.57% reported from 2000 to 2010.

The announcement drew a chilly response (遇冷) on Chinese social media, where many people said they could not afford to have even one or two children. “I am willing to have three children if you give me 5 million yuan (£554,350),” one user posted on Weibo. As a matter of fact, experiment of the three-child policy in Heilongjiang province in the last few years also resulted less effectively than expected.

It is not only China that is facing such a population challenge. Across east Asia, governments have, for years, been struggling to persuade couples to have more babies. South Korea and Japan both have used allowance (津贴) to encourage.

The policy change will come with “supportive measures, which will be beneficial to improving our country’s population structure, fulfilling the country’s strategy of actively coping with an ageing population and maintaining the advantage of human resources”, Xinhua said.

More than 2 million immigrants from Africa live in the United States. A new study from the Pew Research Center finds that they are, on average, college-educated and employed. In fact, they are more likely than native-born Americans to have gained advanced degree. And they are employed at about the same rates as the general population.

The study is important for several reasons. It shows that most Africans living in the U.S. are not struggling, out-of-work persons with little schooling. It also shows that the African immigrant population is different in the U.S. than in Europe. In addition, African immigrants in the U.S. are more likely than those in Europe to be working.

Monica Anderson is a researcher at Pew and one of the writers of the report. She told VOA that the research team wanted to compare the backgrounds of African immigrants in the U.S. to those in Europe. "What we found is that the African immigrant population really stands out and that they are a very highly educated group," Anderson said.

The Pew study is based on 2015 data from the U. S. Census Bureau and Eurostat's Labor Force Survey. One reason for different backgrounds among African immigrants is how close things are to each other. Europe is much easier to reach than the U. S. for low-income Africans. They can come by boat or other ways. In contrast, African immigrants coming to the U.S. often have the money to travel by plane as well as permission to enter the country.

But previous research found that higher education and employment levels do not always mean a higher quality of life. In 2015, researchers at Pew looked at black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, Central America and South America. They found that their average household income was more than $ 8,000 lower than the U.S. average.

People are making more and more demands on the world’s natural resources. If babies born in 1991 live for eighty years, the human population of the world may be anything from twice to three times the present total by 2070. In other words, they will have to share what is left of the earth’s resources with 15 billion other people. But hopefully there will be a significant decrease in the growth of population. What if this does not happen? The answer is that by the time before the babies born in 1991 reach the age of 40 they could be sharing resources with as many as 10 billion other people.

Limiting the pollution of water and the atmosphere, controlling the output of the chemicals that may be causing the global warming and climate change, and eating less meat may go some way to help, but can anyone seriously imagine that these are going to solve the problems of the“baby class”of 1991?

There is no getting away from the fact that people are responsible for the present state of the world, and only people can solve the problems. The decisions have to be taken by people as members of national and local governments, as leaders and decision-makers in industry; as scientists and technologists; as professional engineers and designers; as religious leaders and individual citizens.