China’s demographic transition: A quantitative analysis

Yongkun Yin ()

European Economic Review, 2023, vol. 160, issue C

Abstract: China’s fertility decline was very fast. But the drivers of this decline are not well understood. The common wisdom attributes it to the strict population control policies, particularly the One-Child Policy. Yet, fertility decline might also be due to the spectacular economic transformation and substantial mortality decline. To quantify the effects of different factors on China’s demographic and economic transition, I develop a two-sector overlapping-generation model with workers’ movement from rural to urban areas and endogenous fertility and education choices. Quantitative analysis shows that even without any population policy, the total fertility rate (TFR) would decline from 5.78 children around 1950 to 2.65 children around 2010. However, the population policies were crucial for the TFR to fall below the replacement level and do so very quickly after the 1980s. By around 2010, the cumulative effect of population policies reduced fertility from 2.65 to 1.30 children. The baseline model is also extended to incorporate the hukou system, considering that different hukou types are linked to different child quotas under the One-Child Policy and government transfers. The extended model suggests that the impact of the hukou system on fertility decisions was relatively minor.

Keywords: Demographic transition; Structural transformation; Population policies; Productivity growth; Mortality; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 J13 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292123002192
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: China’s Demographic Transition: A Quantitative Analysis (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:160:y:2023:i:c:s0014292123002192

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2023.104591

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().