A low-fertility trap in China's largest city

THIS week The Economist looks at the backlash against the one-child policy in China. The article points out that the bureaucracy created to run the policy, the family-planning commission, has lost its separate identity and will be merged with the health ministry into a new Health and Family Planning Commission. Normally in China (as elsewhere) power and bureaucracy go together, so this loss of bureaucratic autonomy probably signals a loss of influence, and may presage scrapping the policy itself (though officials say that won’t happen).

But even if it does, how much difference would ending the one-child policy make? Our report focuses on Shanghai and, by chance, China’s biggest city has a great deal of evidence that bears on that question. Most of it suggests the answer is not much.

Under the current policy, adults who were only children themselves are permitted to have two children. According to research by Stuart Basten of Oxford University*, that provision applies to 70% of the city’s couples. In other words, the weight of the one-child policy bears down relatively lightly on Shanghai. Even so, Shanghainese couples have extremely low fertility. The city’s total fertility rate—the number of children a woman can expect to have during her lifetime—was a mere 0.64 in 2002-03 (one of the lowest rates ever recorded in peacetime) before rising slightly to a still-low 0.89 in 2007. The Shanghainese are not having larger families even though they are allowed to.

The reason is that the one-child policy seems to have changed social norms. After two generations of growing up alone, people now expect to have only one child. In 2003 and 2008, the city’s family-planning bureaucrats (the Shanghai Municipal Population and Family Planning Commission) asked 38,000 men and women aged 20-45 about how many children they wanted. They found the average ideal family size was just 1.07, with 81% of respondents saying they wanted only one child and just 15% saying they wanted a second. Admittedly, not all the respondents would necessarily be allowed a second child, and some people may have been extremely cautious about replying to any questions from some of the feared and hated bureaucrats in China. All the same, the figure is strikingly low. It is also worth noting that the share of those saying they wanted no children doubled between the two surveys, though only to 8%.

This does not mean the one-child policy has had no effect (though a few demographers do argue that). Nor does it mean the policy is alone responsible for changing social norms. The cost of educating children and the difficulty of finding accommodation big enough for a family with two children are also factors. But the one-child policy does seems to have forced desired family size down further and faster than would have happened without it. And now that expectations of a small family have taken root, they may well stay low, even if the policy that gave rise to them is scrapped.

*In "Whither the Child?" Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility. Edited by Eric Kaufmann and W. Bradford Wilcox. Paradigm Publishers. Available here.