For example, the Department of Public Welfare manages annuity insurance in the rural areas, the Department of Labor (before reform of the organization) urban wage-earners' annuity insurance, and the Personnel Department civil servants' annuity insurance. There are also several insured pension plans industry-by-industry.
Along with the progress toward the market economy, further reforms and tentative steps towards an insured pension scheme will continue in China.
3. Future Population Trends - Population Growth
At the time of founding the modrn nation in 1949, the Chinese population was about 540 million. It passed 1,140 million in 1990, and reached some 1,236 million at the end of 1997. The population increase over nearly half a century has been almost 700 million, or an increase of 2.3 times expressed by rate. The annual increase in the seven years between 1951 and 1957 was 2% or more, but population growth stagnated between 1958 and 1961. The year 1960 even saw negative population growth, never before seen in the modern nation.
Such stagnation and decrease of population growth during these periods was intimately linked with factors like natural disasters.
After several years of slowdown, the Chinese population instantane-ously regained active growth, and marked a 3.3% increase in 1963, the highest rate since the nation was founded. The population increase did not lose speed after that, and maintained more than 2% per annum natural growth rate between 1962 and 1973. The natural growth rate went below 2% for the first time in 1974 among normal years. Thereafter it gradually declined, and fluctuated at annual averages between 1.1 and 1.4%, but edged up again in the latter 1980s. That edge-up was due to the echo effect from the long and fast population growth from the 1960s to the early 1970s. In the 1990s, the growth rate has been about 1.1% annually.
