This is the short edition of more or less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Thank you for downloading from the BBC.

The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use go to BBC World Service.com

slash podcasts.

Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth

Alexander on this week's program we're going on the

week's program.

We're going to be talking about China.

After nearly 40 years China has abandoned its one-child policy.

The policy was first introduced. abandoned its one-child policy.

The policy was first introduced in 1979, but from March next year China's one-child policy

will come to an end.

It was originally implemented to prevent the Chinese population from becoming

too large and as a result in 2006 the Chinese government claimed that the policy had prevented

400 million births, a statistic which has been widely reported by news

organizations across the world, but how accurate is this number?

I'm always very wary of these kind of statistical estimates. I don't think that we ever can really know the impact of the policy for several reasons.

China's birth rate started decreasing prior to the one-child policy being implemented.

Stephanie Gordon is an academic from the University of Leicester in the UK.

Now, the Chinese assertion that the policy prevented 400 million births is based on the assumption that the country's fertility rate, the average number of children a woman can expect to give birth to, would have remained stable at around three children per woman.

Without the one child rule, the Chinese claim their population would now be 30% bigger,

meaning it would be closing in on 1.7 billion people instead of today being around 1.3 billion.

...