| During the economic development process, how to balance efficiency and equality is not only a tricky problem in income, but also in the education system. Although the educational level of Chinese residents has been greatly improved since the reform and opening-up, educational inequality problems has always existed in the social development. Among many factors affecting educational inequality, fertility is an important channel, there is a correlation between fertility and educational inequality. And, education attainment has an impact on fertility decision-making: the fertility fall with education attainment. From that, the educational distribution and education attainment are linked through fertility. Population and education have always been two high-profile social issue. Research about education inequality、fertility and education attainment have the important meaning to theories and actual.First of all, based on Endogenous Growth Theory, we build an overlappinggenerations model with both fertility and education are thus chosen endogenously, which reveals the mechanisms of education attainment with fertility and fertility with educational inequality in theory. This model is established at a classical model from de la Croix and Doepke(2003), but improvement in two aspects. First, we assume that the population is divided into two unskilled and skilled labors, divided whether to invest in their education. A skilled labor with higher human capital and market wages, they face higher opportunity costs of time spent rearing children,leading to fewer children. Second, we assume that a fraction of children of unskilled labor will choose to become skilled through invest in education. That is, children of unskilled labors are not necessarily to be unskilled workers. Higher wages of skilled labor will attract more and more investment in education, then the proportion of skilled in the next generation will rise, and economy will approach a steady state in which inequality in human capital has vanished. Theoretical analysis lays a foundation for latter empirical study.Further, this paper draws an empirical study on the relation between education attainment and fertility. First of all, we discuss the different education attainment of women’s fertility. Even under the “one-child” family planning laws, a fertility differential exists between educated and uneducated women between 1990 and 2010: fertility fall with women’s education attainment.. Secondly, we study the relationship between fertility and the proportion of female population complete junior middle school by the way of empirical analysis, found that social fertility fall with the improvement of women’s education attainment(complete nine-year compulsory education). Then, our results of measurement differential fertility between educated and uneducated more powerful verify the above conclusion. Finally, empirical evidence between fertility differential and income inequality suggests that the differential between educated and uneducated is greater in less equal provinces.In the last, we adopt Gini coefficient to measure education inequality for 31 provinces in China during 1990~2010, aimed to testing the impact of fertility on education inequality. Our findings are that fertility decline in China can significantly reduce educational inequality,nevertheless, the influence of declining fertility in rural on rural education inequality is small and urban falling fertility will increase urban education inequality. We can derive that fertility decline in China is to reduce the educational gap between urban and rural. The empirical analysis of the subregion results show that fertility decline is beneficial to the areas’ education fair, but the effect is not significant in ethnic minority areas. In addition, education expansion and the government increased investment in education can be very effective to solve the problem of education inequality, but policy should be properly tilted to rural and minority areas. |
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