China’s government has announced it will scrap a policy limiting couples to two children and will now allow them to have three

The government said the problem of an aging population was deepening and the change would help to improve the structure of China’s population and maintain its advantage in human resources.

With 1.4 billion people, China is the world’s most populous country, but by 2050 one in three of them are projected to be of retirement age.

The Chinese government announced the end of the one-child policy back in 2015, but new births in the years since have not increased at a rate sufficient to ward off the ageing crisis.