All couples will be allowed to have two children, Chinas official Xinhua news agency announced as the Communist Party brought an end to decades of strict, sometimes harsh enforcement of the rule.
The strict rules introduced in the 1970s have been progressively relaxed, with Beijing announcing in 2013 that couples could have two children if either of them was an only child.
However, increasing the child quota is unlikely to work in rebalancing Chinas ageing population, because China like everywhere else is looking at a low birth rate especially among affluent, well-educated women.
Women in Chinas poorest rural areas were already allowed to have more than one child, she said.
Growth in the Chinese workforce has in any case made only a small contribution to the economys development in the past 20 years, Capital Economics China economist Chang Liu and Asia economist Gareth Leather said in a report.
The main reason why we expect growth to slow over the coming decades is not that the labour force will soon start to shrink but that the pace of productivity growth is likely to slow as the room for catch-up with richer economies diminishes, they wrote.
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