Do High Birth Rates Hamper Economic Growth?

Hongbin Li and Junsen Zhang

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2007, vol. 89, issue 1, 110-117

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of the birth rate on economic growth by using a panel data set of 28 provinces in China over twenty years. Because China's one-child policy applied only to the Han Chinese but not to minorities, this unique affirmative policy allows us to use the proportion of minorities in a province as an instrumental variable to identify the causal effect of the birth rate on economic growth. We find that the birth rate has a negative impact on economic growth. The finding not only supports the view of Malthus, but also suggests that China's birth control policy is indeed growth enhancing. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (100)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.89.1.110 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:tpr:restat:v:89:y:2007:i:1:p:110-117

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().