鼓励生育政策能否提高生育率?——基于生育成本缺口递增的视角

中国总和生育率的下降引发调整生育政策的讨论,但鲜有对鼓励生育政策的效果评估与理论解释.通过马斯洛需求层次理论构建生育成本缺口递增假说,并基于世界人口政策数据库与OECD家庭数据库对基于转移支付的鼓励生育政策进行了效果评估,得出如下结论:第一,生育成本是一种动态结构,需求跃迁导致生育成本缺口增速快于收入增速,进而决定鼓励...

Can Pro-natalist Policies Raise the Fertility Rates A Perspective of Increasing Fertility Cost Gap

The decline in China’s total fertility rate has triggered discussions on adjusting fertility policies, but there are few evaluations and theoretical explanations of the effects of pro-natalist policies. This paper uses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory to construct the hypothesis of increasing fertility cost gap to estimate the effect of pro-natalist policy based on the transfer payment on the fertility rate by adopting the data from the World Population Policy Database and the OECD Family Database. The following conclusions are drawn: Firstly, the fertility cost is a dynamic construction and the leap in demand have caused the increasing gap between the fertility cost and the income growth, which in turn has determined the difficulties of pro-natalist policy to raise the fertility rate;Secondly, the essence of the current policy of encouraging childbirth lies in transfer payments, which can only change the fertility schedule in the short-term, but does not increase the fertility rate in the long-term;Thirdly the social economic development inevitably leads to lower fertility rates;lastly, the fertility support subsidies associating with income increase seems to be more effective in fertility rate raising than the fixed fertility subsidies. The findings can be of significance to the understanding of the risk of fertility decline and the reasonable and effective fertility encourage policy.