Introduction

Sangaralingam Ramesh ()
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Sangaralingam Ramesh: University of Oxford

Chapter Chapter 1 in The Political Economy of Human Behaviour and Economic Development, 2022, pp 1-41 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract China’s economic rise has primarily been due to the incremental economic reforms instigated by the Chinese government since 1978 when the country began the transition from a centrally planned command economy to a mixed-market economy in which state intervention and free market forces co-exist. However, from a human perspective the key drivers of China’s economic growth have been entrepreneurship and improvements in the possibilities for quality childcare due to the adoption of the one child policy in 1980. In the case of entrepreneurship, the government’s economic and market reforms have allowed opportunity-based and necessity-based entrepreneurs to engage in economic activity by setting up businesses and fuelling China’s economic phenomenal economic growth, which became more pronounced after China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. Moreover, improvements in the possibilities for childcare have been brought about by China’s one child policy, which became a state-sanctioned policy in 1980 due to China’s ever-growing population and fears that the country’s economy would not be able to support it. The policy remained until 2015 and was quickly dismantled due to China’s ever-shrinking population and fears that the slow growth in the population would reduce the workforce available to the economy and a reliance upon a smaller younger population to support a larger and growing elderly population. However, China’s one child policy has facilitated the opportunity for the wider family to save and invest in the well-being and development of one child, the prince or the princess. The level of investment in the one child of the family would have led to higher levels of educational attainment and facilitated China’s transition to some knowledge economy—perhaps matching if not surpassing the innovativeness enshrined in the US economy. Furthermore, in the case of China, entrepreneurship and the knowledge economy may be correlated because needs-based entrepreneurs make the money required to educate their children, whether in China or abroad. However, a negative impact of China’s one child policy has perhaps been the growing selfishness of children brought up with the undivided attention of parents, the maternal and paternal set of grandparents as well as aunts and uncles. This selfishness may lead to a less caring and cohesive society in which the young no longer look after the well-being of elders and where divorce rates and levels of abuse soar.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-12666-6_1

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