(Yicai Global) April 27 -- The hi-tech metropolis of Shenzhen saw a significant drop in elementary school enrollment and mobile phone package subscribers last year, likely due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, high housing costs as well as a shift in employment patterns to white-collar workers from blue-collar ones, experts said.

The city’s primary school registrations fell 6.5 percent last year from 2019 to 190,700 pupils, according to the Shenzhen Bureau of Statistics. Mobile phone users dropped 7.4 percent to 26.82 million, and mobile internet subscribers dipped 1.4 percent to 24.84 million.

The last time in a decade that primary school enrollment fell was in 2019, but at that time it was only by about 1.1 percent or 2,300 people, according to Yicai Global data.

Shenzhen, which lies adjacent to Hong Kong, has evolved from a small fishing village to one of China’s four first-tier cities in the last 40 years. It has had to rely on a huge demographic inflow to support this rapid development. Its permanent resident population jumped 42 times to 13.4 million people in 2019 from 314,100 in 1979.

“The cost of living in Shenzhen is too high,” Peng Peng, executive director of the Guangdong Research Society of Structural Reforms, told Yicai Global. Hence, migrant workers are leaving their young children in their hometowns to be educated and permanent residents are having less children.

Some people relocated back home during the pandemic and have not returned, said Song Ding, deputy director of the China Expert Committee on the Urban Economy. A number of factories have also left town due to the high housing costs, he added.

Shenzhen had the highest real estate pricing-to-income ratio last year, at 48.1 percent, making property in the city the least affordable in the country. The average price of a home in Shenzhen shot up 16 percent in February from the same period in 2020. The average cost of a pre-owned house in five of Shenzhen’s nine districts was more than CNY50,000 (USD7,695) per square meter, according to data from China Real Estate Value.

There has also been a shift in recruitment as the industrial structure in the city changes, with demand for university graduates growing and that for manual laborers falling, said Zhong Jian, a professor at Shenzhen University’s College of Economics.

Editor: Kim Taylor