Asia, Population | featured news

A Chinese government think tank is urging the country's leaders to start phasing out its one-child policy immediately and allow two children for every family by 2015, a daring proposal to do away with the unpopular policy....

Philippine President Benigno Aquino is squaring off against his country's powerful Catholic church in a bid to give people free access to the means to limit the size of their families. The predominately Catholic country has one of Asia's fastest-growing populations together with significant levels of chronic poverty. While neighbors have accelerated towards prosperity, the Philippines has lagged.

Japan's rapid aging means the national population of 128 million will shrink by one-third by 2060 and seniors will account for 40 percent of people, placing a greater burden on the shrinking work force population to support the social security and tax systems.

The world's 7 billionth person will be born into a population more aware than ever of the challenges of sustaining life on a crowded planet but no closer to a consensus about what to do about it.

China's panda population is booming this year thanks to a record number of births in captivity, a rare accomplishment for the endangered species ...

China will continue to limit most families to just one child in the coming decades, state media said Monday, despite concerns ...

Limiting births would allow India time to curb a population that threatens to turn its demography from an asset into a burden.

For years, China curbed its once-explosive population growth with a widely hated one-child limit that at its peak led to forced ...