China's Total Fertility Rate Estimation Based On Model Average

Recently,with the gradual disappearance of the demographic dividend and the accelerated tendency of population aging,scholars pay more attention to the population structure.Fertility levels are an important aspect of the population structure,accurately grasping the development trend of China's population fertility level has important implications for policy planning and adjustment of China's population structure.Total fertility rate compared to the general fertility rate among the many indicators,it is an important reference data for population forecasts,the formulation of economic planning and population policies.Presently,Chinese scholars have different opinions on the true value of the total fertility rate,some studies suggest that China's fertility level is moderately low since the 1990s,the total fertility rate is greater than 1.5,however,another people think that the total fertility rate had dropped to 1.5.The main difficulty for estimating the total fertility is lack of high quality data and imperfect estimation method although its formula is unique.China's total fertility rate can be estimated by choosing the level of economic development,health and education levels as the auxiliary variable among the many socio-economic factors,and applying the model average method.Socio-economic variables have lower cost,more accessible and shorter time compared to the decennial census.Model average method can avoid losing useful information by weighting all the possible models.Compared to the existing estimation methods,the assumptions of model average methods are more relaxed,it targets reduce the prediction error,and focusing on the total fertility rate forecasts not the economic interpretation of parameters.It shows that Chinese total fertility rate is about 1.45 from 2010 to 2013,higher than 1.18released by the 2010 census.According to the total fertility rate of each province,Guangxi,Guizhou and Qinghai's value is relatively large,but Liaoning,Jilin,Heilongjiang's value is relatively small in 2010.Overall,the total fertility rate in the eastern economically developed areas is relatively low compared to the western economically underdeveloped areas.