Fertility And Intergenerational Income Mobility In China

In recent years,although China has made some achievements in narrowing the income gap,the problem of social mobility in China has received more and more attention with the "second generation" phenomenon being a hot debate.As a dynamic measure of income inequality,intergenerational mobility reflects the fairness of individual development opportunities from the micro aspect.At the same time,the birth policy in China has also undergone a process of change from the family planning policy to the current "two-child policy".Fertility affects family decision-making,which in turn affects the intergenerational income relations.Based on this,exploring the relationship between the fertility and the intergenerational income mobility in China is of great significance for the investigation of the impact of China's birth policy and the study of improvement of the social mobility.This paper first summarizes the related literatures on fertility and intergenerational income mobility.On this basis,based on the human capital theory and social capital theory,the mechanisms of the influence of fertility on intergenerational income mobility are proposed,and the possible opposite effects of the two approaches are pointed out.In the empirical analysis part,this paper uses the three-round survey data of the China Family Panel Studies CFPS in 2010,2012 and 2014 to examine the relationship between fertility and the intergenerational income mobility in China.Further,this paper examines and analyzes the impact of fertility on intergenerational income mobility in China from both human capital and social capital.Finally,on the basis of theoretical and empirical analysis,this paper puts forward some opinions and suggestions on the direction of China's birth policy and the improvement of social mobility.Compared with the related literatures,the innovation of this paper is proposing the influence mechanism of fertility on intergenerational income mobility based on the existing economic theory and making an empirical test,which facilitates us to better understand the relationship between the two and the internal reasons.The main conclusions of this paper are as followed:first,overall,the decline of fertility has an effect on the intergenerational income mobility in China,and low fertility leads to higher intergenerational income mobility.Second,the relationship between fertility and intergenerational income mobility in China is heterogeneous.In low-income regions,the relationship is significantly negative,while in high-income regions,the relationship is not obvious,which means that the improvement of the overall mobility is the result of the leading effect of the improvement effect of the low income group.Third,from the two transmission ways of human capital and social capital,on the one hand,the reduction of fertility has indeed improved the quality of human capital for children,especially helps children of low-income families to attained higher educational years and promotes the upward mobility of low-income families.On the other hand,the decline in fertility has strengthened the intergenerational transfer of social capital,which is particularly obvious in high-income families.As the results of the overall regression show that fertility has an improved effect on mobility,it can be seen that human capital occupies the leading position at present.Based on the above analysis,this paper holds that the reduction of fertility helps the low-income group to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty and achieve upward mobility.The implementation of family planning policy has indeed promoted social mobility.However,this effect becomes less significant as income increases.In the future,as the transmission channels of social capital become more and more important,raising the intergenerational mobility in China should focus more on the equality of access to education opportunities and career opportunities.