Yi Fuxian, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the book, Big Country with an Empty Nest, published in 2007, recently said that India may be more populous than China and that the number of Chinese born since 1990 might have been overestimated by 90 million. If Yi Fuxian is correct, China’s population at the end of last year was 1.29 billion (bn), compared to the government’s official figure of 1.38 bn. India’s population is officially estimated at 1.33bn. Yi Fuxian's research was presented to academics in Beijing this week. He told the Financial Times that China’s working age population fell for the first time in 2012 and has been declining ever since, raising the prospect that the country may “get old before it gets rich”. Yi Fuxian believes that without the one child policy, China’s population would have peaked at 1.6bn in 2040 before beginning to decline, allowing the world’s second-largest economy to enjoy a much longer “demographic dividend”. As Beijing officials have recently begun to appreciate the real costs of the one child policy, they warmed to the US-based academic and in March 2017, the Chinese government flew Yi Fuxian business class from the US to attend the Boao Forum for Asia.