Economic Analysis Of China’s Childbearing Policy Under The Low Total Fertility Rate

Referred to the super ministry system reform of The China centralgovernment in2013, the obligations of Health Ministry and theresponsibilities of the family planning supervision and service of PlannedParenthood committee have been integrated. In addition, the statecommittee of health and family planning has been established. Moreattention has been paid to promoting quality of newborn babies andstandard of health services, thus transforming into public service orientedpattern. In accordance with the decisions of3rd Plenum of the18thCommunist Party of China (CPC), Chinese couples with one spousebeing an only child would be permitted to have two children. Comparedwith the policy that only-child families could be permitted to have twochildren, the policy will be relaxed. At the beginning of2014, the policyhas been implemented in Zhejiang province.Many famous economists and scholars of economics in the Westhave been aware of the relationship between the population and economicgrowth for a long time. Pessimistic thought says that population growthwill hinder economic growth, for economic growth cannot meet the needsof population growth. Optimistic thought argues that population growthwill not affect the economic development; they believe that relying on theprogress of human intelligence, science and technology can completely solve the problems of food shortages caused by population growth,resource crisis and environmental stress, and so on. In conclusion, thegrowth of population and economic are inseparable, that laid a theoreticalbasis of empirical research of population and economic growth in China.The one child policy, implemented since the country’s infancy, hadbeen experienced several more revisions before it was maturity. Theobjectives of policy in different phases were not the same, and thendifferent policies have different impacts. In the early age of the newnation, the policies encouraged birth in practice, although no specificsystem was been formulated on birth control. Birth limitation policy wason the agenda, started at the late50’s of the20th century. The efforts ofthe policy implementation had been increased into stricter gradually.Even though it was interrupted for a period of time during the CulturalRevolution, each stage of the target population had reached, and theimpacts were remarkable. Under the specific historical background,controlling the population quantity target has been reached; however, lowfertility produced a series of “chain reaction”, caused by long-termpopulation control.We can use the income-outcome analysis to evaluate the result of thechildbearing policy. From the perspective of the social benefit of policyimplementation, adverse consequences are dominant. From the impact onfertility behavior, lots of rational parents are not willing to have more children, and even choose not to get birth, because of the high cost. Thephenomenon leads to unbalance of the birth sex ratio; short supply in theworking-age population, and aging of labor force. Low fertility alsocaused serious population aging. Therefore bring-up ratio of agingpopulation goes up, and then pension burden of family and societyincreases. By the means of examining the economic benefits of policyimplementation, simple empirical econometric analysis, the unary linearregression model and the theory of correlation coefficient, it was foundthat the population birth rate and GDP growth is negative correlation, thatis, low fertility increases GDP. In the long term, low natural growth rateof population is associated with long-term economic development. Theassociation is a long-term co-integration and causal relationship. That isto say, the low natural growth rate of population brought the rapiddevelopment of GDP. The rapid development of GDP restricted thenatural population growth rate, then keeping it at a lower level. From theanalysis and comparison of them, the childbearing policy implementationcost significantly more than the implementation of income, in the periodof low fertility rate, the controlling of childbearing make the socialdevelopment at a expensive cost, it is imperative to adjust.In summary, the combination and exploration of the scheme of thefertility policy adjustment conclude the focus of debate on the adjustmentdirection of domestic scholars. The focus is whether the two fetuses’ policy can be loosened. According to the three basic principles of fertilitypolicy——fairness, efficiency and gradualism, and examples ofsuccessful domestic second child birth pilot and regions, correspondingreforms can be put forward.