China has removed a three-decade-old tax exemption on contraceptive drugs and devices from 1 January in \u2060new steps to increase the country’s birth rate.<\/p>\n
Condoms and contraceptive pills now incur value-added tax of 13%, the standard rate for \u200dmost consumer goods.<\/p>\n
The move comes as China struggles to boost birth rates in the world’s second-largest economy.<\/p>\n
The country’s population fell for a third consecutive year in 2024 and experts have cautioned the downturn will continue.<\/p>\n
China exempted childcare subsidies from personal income tax and rolled out an annual childcare subsidy last year, following a series of “fertility-friendly” measures \u2060in 2024, such as urging colleges and universities to provide “love education” to \u2060portray marriage, love, fertility and family in a positive light.<\/p>\n
Leaders again pledged last month \u2060at \u200dthe annual \u2060Central Economic Work Conference to promote “positive marriage and childbearing attitudes” to stabilise birth \u200drates.<\/p>\n
China’s birth rates have been falling for \u2060decades as a result of the one-child policy China implemented from 1980 to 2015, and rapid urbanisation.<\/p>\n
The high cost of childcare and education as well as job uncertainty and \u200da slowing economy have also discouraged many young Chinese from getting married and starting \u2060a family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China has removed a three-decade-old tax exemption on contraceptive drugs and devices from 1 January in \u2060new steps…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223051,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-223050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}