Demographic Time Bomb - The 2016 scrapping of China's one-child policy has failed to trigger a widely expected wave of childbirths. - caixinglobal.com
Childbirth data released Thursday by the Chinese government's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) cast doubt over earlier projections of a rise in the birth rate: NBS said childbirths nationwide declined to 17.3 million in 2017, down 680,000 from 2016 and far below an estimate of up to 21.95 million childbirths for 2017 issued by the National Health and Family Planning Commission shortly after the two-child policy was introduced.
China could in fact experience a “precipitous fall” in childbirths as women in their child-bearing years have recently appeared reluctant to bear more than one offspring due to rising housing and schooling costs, according to a recent report by Liang Jianzhang, a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, and Huang Wenzheng, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University.
Liang and Huang further expect the number of childbirths to decline sharply this year and by between 300,000 and 800,000 annually over the next decade.
Although the new family planning policy could challenge public resource allocations, more studies will be needed to assess its full impact, according to Professor Lu Ping at Zhejiang University’s Research Center for Public Policy for Children.
“Given the rising number of migrants amid rapid urbanization, policymakers could be blindsided if they continue to use data collected via the household registration system, which excludes migrants, to allocate school resources,” Lu said.
The Beijing municipal government pledged to give any school operator or investor 10,000 yuan ($1,500) for every classroom seat created in a kindergarten, according to a city government document on school subsidies released in January. But there may already be an over-supply.
Many kindergartens and preschools that have not been counted by government statisticians have been deemed “illicit” not because of poor construction or substandard teaching but because their builders violated zoning rules, according to Song Yingquan, an associate professor at Peking University’s China Institute for Educational Finance Research.
An easing of zoning rules "could help ease the supply crunch and save public resources,” he said. |
