Official: China to further explore labor force options

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China still enjoys a demographic dividend and will further improve the labor force participation rate and workforce quality, a statistics official said on Wednesday.

Though the total employed population dropped for the first time in recorded history in 2018 and is likely to fall further in the next few years, China has a workforce pool of about 900 million people, with some 780 million of them in employment, Li Xiru, head of the population and employment statistics department with the National Bureau of Statistics said.

Population in the mainland totaled 1.39 billion by the end of last year, up 5.3 million people and 3.81 thousandths year-on-year, while new births reached 15.23 million in 2018, with the birth rate dipping to 10.94 thousandths.

Driven by the lower fertility in the population growth and fewer women of childbearing age, new births are predicted to continuously drop each year for some time in the future, but still outnumber deaths.

China's urbanization rate reached 59.58 percent in 2018, an increment of 1.06 percent as compared to the previous year.

The country is aging further with the share of people at and above 60 years old in the total population rising by 0.6 percentage points last year.

China decided in 2015 to allow couples to have two children in a bid to boost new births and deal with an aging population.

(With inputs from Xinhua)