Family planning and fertility inequality: Evidence from the abolition of China's one‐child policy

Nana Chen, Hangtian Xu and Yang Xu

Asian Economic Journal, 2024, vol. 38, issue 1, 86-117

Abstract: This study takes China's one‐child policy (OCP)—a widely known policy intervention for family planning—as an example to illustrate that an income‐based penalty scheme for above‐quota births may cause fertility inequality. A couple can legally have only one child under the OCP, and those who exceed the quota are subject to fines. To ensure that this penalty scheme does not biasedly affect only low‐income people who are relatively more sensitive to fines of a certain amount, it was designed to be income‐based, which makes the perceived cost of the rich equal to that of the poor. However, we find that due to the limited liability nature of the financial penalty, it unintentionally created fertility inequality that favors the poor. Relying on city‐year‐level panel data, we find that this mechanism partly explains the lower birth rates in rich cities in the OCP era; the gap narrowed rapidly after the OCP abolition.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/asej.12319

Related works:
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:bla:asiaec:v:38:y:2024:i:1:p:86-117

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1351-3958

Access Statistics for this article

Asian Economic Journal is currently edited by Sung Yun-Wing and Shigeyuki Abe

More articles in Asian Economic Journal from East Asian Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().