China is intensifying its efforts to incentivize childbearing by proposing to make hospital deliveries free of charge, reports Caixin. This is the latest step in a broad campaign to reverse the country’s deepening demographic decline.

The National Healthcare Security Administration, the country’s medical-insurance regulator, set out plans at a meeting last week to eliminate out-of-pocket costs for childbirth within policy limits. Seven provinces, including Jilin, Jiangsu and Shandong, have already rolled out policies to fully cover inpatient delivery expenses.

The initiative comes as Beijing grapples with a shrinking workforce and an ageing society. While the government has scrapped birth limits and introduced various incentives, the high cost of raising a child remains a primary deterrent for many families.

Beijing has announced that all childbirth deliveries in hospitals will become free in 2026. This is the latest move in an ongoing campaign aimed at tackling the declining population.

Since the one child policy was abolished around ten years ago, the Chinese leadership has struggled to get people to have children, but the birthrate has continued to persistently decline. 

One big factor in this is the financial burden that raising a family has on many households. A declining population has a significant knock-on effect on the entire economy. A growing population is a good basis for a strong economy, as human beings consume, while robots don’t.

China approved its first homegrown mRNA vaccine for COVID-19, adding a key tool to combat future outbreaks of the virus that was missing due to Beijing’s reluctance to allow Western-made shots using the gene-based technology, reports The Wall Street Journal.

CSPC Pharmaceutical Group’s messenger-RNA vaccine, known as SYS6006, was given emergency-use clearance by regulators, the company said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange Wednesday. The vaccine was designed to work against the latest variants of COVID-19, and also proved effective against older strains, it said.

China has relied on older technology, primarily so-called inactivated vaccines, to protect its population during the pandemic, as well as exporting billions of shots—many to poorer countries. But as the virus mutated, China’s vaccines proved less effective against the highly transmissible Omicron variants than did the mRNA ones produced by the West.

Asia-focused insurer AIA Group’s net profit plummeted in 2022, as investment returns suffered amid rising interest rates, although the company sees positive trends this year in the key mainland China market, reports Nikkei Asia. The Hong Kong-based company’s net profit dropped 96.2% to $282 million, down from $7.42 billion in 2021 and marked its biggest decline since the group’s Hong Kong IPO in 2010, according to company filings submitted Friday.

Its earnings reflect a year in which global markets took a hit as many central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, aggressively raised interest rates to head off a wave of inflation stemming in part from economic and supply chain distortions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

AIA last year recorded its “poorest investment returns ever in history,” amid rising interest rates, according to a research note by Sanford C. Bernstein published Friday.

China spent RMB 150 billion ($21.5 billion) in 2021 and 2022 to vaccinate the world’s largest population against COVID-19, according to the National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA), reports Caixin.

The expenses include the purchase of vaccine shots and inoculation costs, paid by the state-run medical insurance fund and fiscal subsidies, according to the administration.

In 2022, the medical insurance fund paid RMB 4.3 billion for nucleic acid testing for COVID infections, the administration said. The spending mainly covered tests required for patients to be admitted by hospitals.