The number of new births in China declined by 2m last year, pushing the country's population growth rate to its lowest level since the aftermath of a disastrous famine in the early 1960s.

New births in China were 15.2m last year, compared with 17.2m in 2017, the first year in which births saw a decline following a rare year of increase after the introduction of a "two child" policy in 2015, the national bureau of statistics said on Monday. 

Economists expect an increasingly elderly population to be a drag on China's birth rate. The figures showed that Beijing's efforts to increase births by loosening restrictions on family size are having little effect, adding pressure on policymakers to increase financial and other incentives for new births.