property prices, especially the land component," Nishimura said. At the same time, "not every country experiencing this sort of demographic change has a malign property bubble and a financial crisis," he said. China's Demographics Nishimura said that peaks in the working-age population in Japan were accompanied by property-market highs, and a "similar" picture emerged in the U.S. Cai Fang, a demographics adviser to the Chinese leadership, said yesterday that the nation's potential economic growth rate may be about 1 percentage lower in the second half of this decade after the labor force peaked. Cai said last year that the "age structure of the population is a driving force of economic growth" and the nation may move away from its one-child policy in coming years. Implemented to alleviate poverty, the restriction on family size will cut the number of 15- to 24-year-olds, the mainstay of factories that drove growth for two decades, by 27 percent to 164 million by 2025, according to United Nations estimates. Premier Wen Jiabao is maintaining curbs on China's housing market even as the nation's economy slows because the government wants to rein in prices inflated by the stimulus spending that countered the global financial crisis. Economic Slowdown The world's second-biggest economy grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter of this year, the least since 2009. The Shanghai Composite Index fell about 4 percent this year on concern that weaker growth will erode corporate profits. China's new home prices climbed in July from a month earlier in