Can New Fertility Policy Turn the Low Fertility Up in China?

Xiaochun Qiao, Peking University

Chinese government just issued a new fertility policy on November 15, 2013, that is, allowing couples to have second child if one of them (couples) is from one-child family. The objective of this paper is to estimate how many additional births would be born and analyze the differences between the estimated and real results. We use representative survey data for birth desires for 29 provinces (except for Tibet and Xinjiang) with 63.6 thousand women aged 15-44, conducted by NHFPC in August, 2013. We found that the childbearing women, who meet the requirement of the new policy and have desire to have the second baby, would bear 5.63 – 7.56 million additional births totally. Until July 31st, there were only 0.48 million childbearing women, who meet the requirement, submitting their applications for the second child. The conclusion is that the implementation of the new policy may not substantially increase the fertility to the level of expected.