the electric car battery maker britishvolt has gone into administration after hopes of a last minute bid for the company faded. the collapse raises questions about uk hopes of building a home grown battery industry. the company, which had plans to build a gigafactory to make the uk start up had been expecting to build a new 5.8 billion or $4.7 billion factory in northumberland, as part of a long term vision to boost uk manufacturing. well, this promotional video shows what the factory with a capability to make 300,000 electric batteries a year would have looked like. the plan was to create 3,000 jobs at the plant. now, administrators have taken over the business and most of britishvolt s 300 staff are being made redundant. here s our business editor simonjack. so what went wrong? britishvolt was a start up company with no track record. their battery technology was only at the prototype stage. although there are expressions of interest from lotus and aston martin, they
i feel worried about the population decline especially in my generation who were born after 1990. most of us are the only child, if we are not married the girl will need to take care of her parents and their grandparents if they are still alive. so the burden on everyone is quite heavy. putting aside the financial burdens is quite a heavy commitment for people in our generation terms of time and energy. so let s take a look at some of the numbers. china s population last year was over 1.4 billion people according to official data. that s a decrease of 850,000 people from 2021. the national birth rate also hit a record low 6.77 births per thousand people. compare that with the united states 11.06 births per thousand people. here s one assessment of why this is happening. chinese populations, ethnic populations outside of the people s republican, in taiwan, singapore, hong kong. in malaysia. you find that in all of this places as populations have got work richer, urban, educated
set china apart from the rest was their seemingly inexhaustible supply of human capital. but today, china is less the exception, more a reflection of broader trends. their population is shrinking. as populations tend to do, the more affluent, the more educated they become. for for the first time in 60 years, the growth curve has dipped, despite the communist party s efforts to encourage people to have more children. overall, the population fell by 850,000 from 2021, to 1.4 billion that s the lowest figure since 1961. seven years since the one child policy was scrapped, the birth rate is struggling to recover. it now stands at 6.77 per 1,000 people which might not mean a lot, but by comparison the united states recorded 11.06 births per 1000 in 2021, the united kingdom 10.08. so what does all that mean? i m joined now byjennifer sciubba, fellow at the wilson centre in washington, dc and author of 8 billion and counting: how sex, death, and migration shape our world. welcome to the