Lesson From An About-Turn

Context: China shows restrictive population policy doesn’t work. There are other ways to support fertility decline.

Background: Recently, China announced that married couples may have up to three children, officially marking an end to the population control experiment that led to the draconian one-child policy in 1980.

Impact of China’s One-child Policy:

• Huge demographic change: The 2020 Chinese census showed a sharp increase in the proportion of the population above age 60 to 18.7 per cent, up from 1.3 per cent in 2010.
• Discriminatory: China’s one-child policy led to human rights abuses encouraging sex-selective abortion and abandonment of girls in a society where parents desperately wanted a son but were able to have only one child. The one-child policy averted 400 million births.

Role of socioeconomic development in declining population:

• It is argued that most of the fertility decline in China’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) from 5.8 in 1970 to an estimated 1.6 in 2015 came from socioeconomic development rather than population control policies.
  • This can be true, as the relaxation of the one-child policy to two children in 2016 failed to halt fertility decline, and the TFR fell to 1.3 in 2020.
• Extremely low fertility in Southern Europe and East Asia may be a result of gender inequality.
  • With rising education and increasing economic opportunities, women have a greater incentive to participate in the labour force.
• In East Asia, intensive parenting demands led to decline: Competition in education and the job market is fierce in these nations, incentivising families to focus on a single child.

Role of the government in reversing the fertility decline:

• Positive impact: Many countries institute policies encouraging people to have more children.
  • They range from providing cash benefits to parents (France), providing generous maternity and paternity leaves (Sweden, Japan), and improving childcare availability (Norway, Japan).
  • Family-friendly policies in countries like Sweden seem to have halted the slide, with TFR in Sweden hovering around 1.7.
• No impact:
  • Despite many policy initiatives, the TFR in Japan has refused to budge from a level of about 1.4.
  • Large cash incentives, called baby bonuses, in countries like Spain (TFR=1.25) brought about only a tiny increase in fertility and were eventually dropped.
  • Increasing costs of raising children, pregnancy discrimination against women, and care responsibilities for older family members create a time and money squeeze for families that do not facilitate fertility increase.

Lessons for India:

• To help families plan convenient childbearing: This is to move beyond the language of the past that restricts maternity leave and election eligibility for a third child and beyond.
  • This is likely to be particularly important for young, educated women who contend with the burden of in- tensive parenting in a highly competitive educational environment along with the unequal burden of domestic responsibilities.
• Encouraging male participation: In housework, improving their ability to combine work and family, and improving family planning services will generate an environment where our TFR would stabilise around 1.7.