Economics of one Child Policy

1.0 Economics of One Child Policy

Dictated by economic development and influenced by other sociological factors such as tradition, religion, or other personal beliefs, the population of a country can be its greatest asset or its greatest liability. A country’s population is able to determine how much a nation is able to produce within a given period of time and to influence the country’s economy in the long run. On the other hand, a country’s population also draws on limited resources of a nation such as investments in education, healthcare, and government welfare programs.

Fundamentally, the three basic economic factors of production are land, labor and capital. While it is true that the higher the population, the more the labor which in turns increases production, it has led some leaders to believe that their countries' birth rates should rise as much as possible. One of these leaders was Mao Zedong; the Communist China under Mao’s leadership had considered its rural population as an asset.

The people’s commune system did very little to limit child-birth; in fact it might have even promoted higher birthrates. With the size of the family as the measure for distributing food and allocating �private plots’, at the same time, households did not have the limiting factor of farm size since production was collectivized. There was thus no individual incentive to restrict child-birth out of fear that the land could not feed the family. Finally, the care of the rural elderly was still a matter for the individual family, and so there was a strong incentive to want more children to give support in one’s old age.

Faced with such glaring problems, the level of available labor had significantly surpassed China's other resources. The factors of production have become unbalanced, leading to a labor surplus. This created problems for China’s strained resources in supplying quality education and providing high quality healthcare to such a vast population.

2.0 History of the One Child Policy

During the Cultural Revolution, China’s birthrate had soared to a record high of 5.8 children a couple and had started to strain on China’s limited water, food and other critical resources. In order to prevent the population growth from spiraling out of control, family planning policies were initiated during the Cultural Revolution in 1973. The One Child Policy was then initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Introduced as a temporary measure to combat overpopulation issues during the period, it is still currently in practice today.

The overall population pressure seen in relation to the scarcity of resources has been the main reason for introducing this policy. The policy restricts the Han Chinese living in urban areas from having more than one child. People from the other ethic minorities in China are allowed to have more than one child. Currently, while the one child policy promotes couples from having one child in both rural and urban area, the actual implementation of the policy differs from province to province. Even though this is strictly enforced in the urban areas, couples who both come from single child families are allowed to have two children. In the rural areas, families are allowed to have a second child if the first child was a girl or born disabled.

Failure to compile with the policy, people are threatened with fines, heavy pressure to abort the pregnancy, and in some of the more extreme cases, forced sterilization is done during the second or subsequent pregnancies. There have been ways to bypass the policy with methods ranging from having children overseas and not registering them for Chinese citizenship to men having children with mistresses.

3.0 Enforcement and Impact

While the compliance of the One Child Policy in the urban areas was high, there were serious problems in the rural areas. As a result the authorities sought to force through compliance by imposing Draconian punishment on those who did not comply. Local officials were made personally responsible for meeting the quotas of one child per couple and with a certain proportion of women using contraceptives or being sterilized (after a certain number of births).

Threatened with a demotion or dismissal for not meeting the family planning performance plan in their provinces, local officials were often inclined to impose the policy in an even more heavy-handed way than they were meant to. Causing a lot of pain and suffering for the families involved, the ways included abducting pregnant women to undergo forced abortions, destroying assets belonging to families having too many children, refusing to register (and report)