The universal two-child policy will likely add an average of 2.5 million newborns per year, unleashing 75 billion yuan ($11.8 billion) in additional consumption, said a scholar of Peking University. 
 
 China lifted its more than three-decade-old family planning policy, according to a statement issued on Thursday by the Communist Party of China Central Committee, under which roughly 90 million couples will become eligible to have a second child. 
 
 The estimate is based on the prediction that each child brings an average of 30,000 yuan expense each year, Liang Jianzhang, professor of economics at Peking University, told Securities Times. He added that the government is expected to expand its annual infrastructural investment by 225 billion yuan over the next five to 10 years. 
 
 A woman plays with a girl on a street outside the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on Nov 8, 2013.[Zou Hong/Asianewsphoto] 
 
 The latest move comes amid the nation's changing demographics, which could lead to potential labor shortages in the future if not addressed. 
 
 The statement said the China's aging trend would be actively addressed by the national two-child policy, and that it would continue to stick to the family planning policy as a basic State interest. 
 
 "This policy change could have a positive impact on demographics, and hence the economic outlook, but any such impact will only crystallize over the long term," Atsi Sheth, associate managing director of Moody’s, noted in a report on Friday. 
 
 In late 2013, the government first relaxed the family planning policy, allowing couples to have a second child in situations where one spouse was an only child. However, as of June, only 1.5 million of the 11 million eligible couples had applied to have a second child. 
 
 The country has suffered from low fertility rate, with the ratio hitting the bottom at 1.18 in 2010 and only slightly rebounding to 1.24 in 2013, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. A minimum of 2.1 is required to replace an aging population, experts said. 
 
 Shan Juan contributed to this story. ||||| A mainland court has exonerated a young man executed for rape and murder nearly 20 years ago, but analysts cautioned that wrongful convictions would continue until the judicial system was thoroughly reformed. 
 
 The Inner Mongolia Higher People's Court said yesterday that Huugjilt, who was 18 when he was killed by firing squad in 1996, was innocent. 
 
 "We learned a heartbreaking lesson in this case; we are sorry," said Zhao Jianping, the court's deputy president. He presented 30,000 yuan (HK$37,960) to the parents as an expression of "sympathy", according to Xinhua. 
 
 Huugjilt's parents later visited his grave, where they burned a copy of the verdict "to tell him that the wrongful conviction has been redressed", the family said on its Weibo account. 
 
 His 62-year-old mother broke into tears in front of the grave. "I knew you were innocent, but I could not help you; I miss you so much," she said, according to video carried on the website of The Beijing News. 
 
 The court said it would set up a team to investigate the officials involved in the case. 
 
 The acquittal came three days after the Supreme People's Court ordered the Shandong Provincial Higher Court to review another controversial case. Nie Shubin was convicted of raping and murdering a woman in 1994 and was executed the following year. He was 21. 
 
 In 2005, a man arrested for a separate crime, Wang Shujin, confessed to the murder. The top court in Hebei , where Nie was executed, said it would review the case but there has been little progress in nine years. 
 
 The judicial system has been criticised as lacking independence, with government officials regularly steering court decisions, and prosecutors using "confessions" obtained through police torture. 
 
 Xu Xin, a law professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, had long pushed for reviews of the two cases. He said that without fundamental reform to improve judicial independence, "there will be more wrongful convictions even though some are being redressed". 
 
 He Weifang, a law professor at Peking University, said the two reviews were landmarks but little had been done to reform the judiciary. "There's no change to the problems in the system, such as inadequate judicial independence, government intervention, too much power in police hands, an unclear accountability mechanism and wide use of torture." 
 
 Huugjilt's case drew wide public interest after a series of media reports, later supported by legal experts, claiming the information presented to the court was flawed. Zhan Jiang, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the public sympathised with Huugjilt and Nie because they were executed at a young age. 
 
 Huugjilt was found guilty of raping and murdering the woman in a public toilet in Hohhot on April 9, 1996. He was sentenced to death and executed two months later. In 2005, an alleged serial rapist and killer, Zhao Zhihong, told police he had carried out the crime. But a retrial was held only in November. ||||| BEIJING China on Monday exonerated a teenager executed more than 18 years ago for the rape and murder of a woman, drawing approval from judicial reform advocates who saw his death as a symbol of the miscarriage of justice in capital punishment cases. 
 
 A retrial by an Inner Mongolian court found that Huugjilt, then 18 years old, was wrongly convicted in 1996 of raping and killing a woman in a public restroom. 
 
 Another man confessed to the murder in 2005, but a retrial was not conducted until this year, the official Xinhua news agency reported. 
 
 A court official apologized to Huugjilt's sobbing parents, who had been petitioning judicial authorities since 2006 to re-try the case, state media reported. 
 
 China has embarked on legal reforms, including reducing the use of death penalty, as public discontent mounts over wrongful punishment. 
 
 "This shows the spirit behind judicial reform in our country and that the will to pursue justice exists - that's a good thing," said Chen Guangzhong, a top scholar of criminal law at the China University of Political Science and Law. 
 
 Chen added, however, that there remain significant obstacles to reform of the death penalty and that abolishing capital punishment completely is unlikely at present. 
 
 The decision to exonerate Huugjilt was the most talked-about topic on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, with 84,000 comments. 
 
 Huugjilt's family could not be reached for comment. Many ethnic Mongols in China use only one name. 
 
 While wrongful executions have often stirred public outrage, capital punishment itself has wide support from the Chinese public. 
 
 China guards the number of people executed annually as a state secret but anti-death penalty campaigners say it uses the death penalty in far greater numbers than other countries. 
 
 "Death penalty cases have been subjected to closer scrutiny in recent years, in large part in a response to domestic outcry in cases of individuals who are convicted of serious crimes like murder and rape who are found later to be innocent," said Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch. 
 
 The government has tightened rules on evidence to exclude confessions obtained through torture, although torture is still widely used, Wang said. China denies that the practice is widespread and says a torture ban is effectively enforced. 
 
 China said in October it is considering trimming nine crimes from the list of offences punishable by death in a draft amendment to the criminal law. 
 
 The death penalty applies to 55 offences in China, including fraud and illegal money-lending. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Edmund Klamann)
– Eighteen years ago, an 18-year-old was put to death after reportedly confessing to the rape and murder of a woman. In 2005, another man admitted to the crime—but only today was the teenager's conviction ruled wrongful, Reuters reports. The teen, named Huugjilt, made his confession after 48 hours of interrogation in China, PressTV reports. But the court says the confession didn't match the evidence, including findings from an autopsy. An official with the court in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region within China, has given Huugjilt's parents some $4,850 following the renewed verdict. According to state news via the South China Morning Post, Huugjilt and a friend were walking by a public restroom when they heard yelling; as Huugjilt tried to help, the two found a woman's body, the friend says. "We learnt a heart-breaking lesson in this case; we are sorry," the court official told the weeping parents, who have been trying to have the case retried since 2006. A criminal law expert in China says "this shows the spirit behind judicial reform in our country and that the will to pursue justice exists—that's a good thing." But reformers say China must go further by abolishing the death penalty, stopping government influence over court decisions, and banning police torture for confessions (which is illegal but still happens, a professor says). Meanwhile, Huugjilt's parents visited their son's grave and ripped up a copy of the verdict. "The wrongful conviction has been redressed," they wrote online. At the grave, his mother wept in a video posted by the Beijing News: "I knew you were innocent, but I could not help you; I miss you so much," she says. (In one reform, China has stopped transplanting organs from executed prisoners.)