The cost of children. Parts II and III

In this paper the author estimates the compensating variation of income which will be necessary to keep the standard of living of a family constant when a child is born to the family. Various methods of estimation are tried, and an attempt is made to calculate the cost of a child in 1948, after allowances have been made for services provided by the government.     

Public pensions,family allowances and endogenous demographic change

In addition to an old-age insurance system which redistributes income from the young to the old, family allowances build a further redistributive system which typically favors younger and burdens older generations. Family allowances have two main tasks: first, child allowances offer an incentive for child-bearing which influences fertility in an economy. Second, subsidies which ease the financial burden of a child's education guarantee a higher average level of productive skills and therefore enhance net domestic product. If individual demand for having and educating children leads to an impact on the economic system as a whole, we have external effects. In such a case, corrective taxation (Pigouvian tax) should be considered.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at conferences in Bergen, Dublin, Gmunden, Oldenburg and Vienna. The paper benefitted greatly from discussions with participants of these conferences and from the suggestions of two anonymous referees of this journal. Financial support through the Norwegian Research Council (the Ruhrgas scholarship scheme) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Sonderforschungsbereich 303) is gratefully acknowledged.     

The elimination of contraceptive acceptor targets and the evolution of population policy in India

In 1996 the government of India announced a new national population policy that eliminated numerical targets for new contraceptive acceptors. This paper examines the history of target setting in India and factors that led to the elimination of targets. The analysis is based on published and unpublished reports on India's population policy and the family planning programme and interviews with senior Indian and foreign officials and population specialists. Five factors are identified as playing a role in the evolution from target setting to a target-free policy: (1) the research of India's academics; (2) the work of women's health advocates; (3) the support of officials in the state bureaucracy who approved the target-free approach; (4) the influence of the donors to India's family planning programme, especially the World Bank; and (5) the International Conference on Population and Development.     

Family policies,employment and poverty among partnered and single mothers

The risk of poverty for single mothers ranges from less than 2% in Sweden to more than 35% in the United States; less extreme cross-national variations also exist for partnered mothers. We explore which family policies are most effective at directly reducing poverty among families with children, and whether these policies indirectly reduce poverty through supporting mothers’ employment. We combine microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study with the Work-Family Policy Indicators dataset, and use multilevel logistic regressions to examine the associations between policy and poverty, controlling for individual-level factors. We find significant effects of family allowances, generous parental leaves and childcare provisions, with more powerful effects for single mothers. We further show that parental leave and childcare operate through boosting mothers’ employment, illustrating that work-family policies are useful for reducing poverty by enhancing mother's employment.     

Junior partners: Women's contribution to family income in Canada

This research examines the degree of financial contribution of married women to their overall family income. This phenomenon is analyzed from the point of view of sex-role/human capital orientations. The sex-role position argues that regardless of women's social, economic and education background their financial input to household economy will always be less than fifty percent because women's financial opportunities are impeded by sex-role configurations and expectations. The human capital thesis explains women's apparent inability to contribute more than half of the family income as a function of their lower human capital; that is, education, professionalization and training in the labour market. Individual data pertaining to thirty-year old married women, taken from the 1981 Canadian census, are examined. Generally, we find support for the positions: Women with relatively high human capital assmulation contribute significantly to overall household income, but invariably that contribution is less than 50 percent of total family income. On average, all women contribute 22 percent of their families annual income, while working women provide approximately 33 percent of the total. This analysis demonstrates what appears to be a pervasive phenomenon in industrial nations: married women are generally junior economic partners within the family. The extent of junior partnerships, however, is somewhat conditioned by women's human capital resources.     

The impact of family policy expenditure on fertility in western Europe

This article analyzes the impact on fertility of changes in national expenditure for family allowances, maternity- and parental-leave benefits, and childcare subsidies. To do so, I estimate a model for the timing of births using individual-level data from 16 western European countries, supplemented with data on national social expenditure for different family policy programs. The latter allow approximation of the subsidies that households with children receive from such programs. The results show that increased expenditure on family policy programs that help women to combine family and employment-and thus reduce the opportunity cost of children—generates positive fertility responses.     

Examining Taiwan’s Paradox of Family Decline with a Household-based Convoy

Taiwan’s paradox of family decline is examined with a household-based convoy, which allows us to explore the paradox from two perspectives, namely, the modified extended family and the household-based convoy. The modified extended family refers to the reunion of spatially separated families covering two generations. The household-based convoy is an extension of the modified extended family that includes relatives and friends with whom there is frequent contact. A probability sample survey with 1,979 cases completed is used to answer two questions: (1) Has there been a change in Taiwan’s family function because of structural change? (2) Is the family’s function being replaced by relatives and friends with whom there is frequent contact? The results of this study show that the coverage of the modified extended family is as high as 81%, indicating a high coherence among spatially separated households covering two generations. The proportions of the respondents who have provided five types of support including sick care, household chores, advice, regular allowances, and irregular allowances to non-coresiding parents are mostly around 40%. Moreover, the members of a modified extended family do have independent functions in relation to most types of support. These findings all lend evidence to refute the view that the family is declining in Taiwan.     

Social Security in China: Government White Paper

The largest financial problem faced by many aging societies is how to support their older, retired members. That support was once wholly a matter for individual families, with perhaps a minimal safety net offered by charitable institutions. Increasingly, in the usual course of economic development, the requisite transfers become a responsibility of the state—financed either through tax revenues or by pensions offered by (or required of) employers. The combination of lengthening life expectancy at later ages and falling fertility, however, makes those transfers ever more onerous as fewer workers are expected to support greater numbers of retirees. The situation is often likened to the approaching collapse of a Ponzi scheme. Not surprisingly, governments see an attractive solution in what is in effect a reprivatization of responsibility—not back to the family but right to the individual, through a system of individual retirement accounts (albeit with considerable state supervision). The financial trans‐fers—savings and later dissavings—then take place over each person's life cycle. Establishing a social security system—through pay‐as‐you‐go transfers, individual retirement accounts, or some combination of the two—is a major institution‐building and administrative task for a developing country, the more so in the context of rapid population aging. China is certainly a case of rapid aging, with the proportion of the population over age 60 projected to rise from 10 percent in 2000 to 20 percent by 2025 and 30 percent by 2050. The document excerpted below, a 2004 White Paper issued by the government of China, describes China's current social insurance provisions and the proposed expansion of coverage (beyond government employees and the urban formal sector) over coming years. In urban areas, it envisages pension coverage of “all eligible employees,” with an increasing emphasis on personal accounts. (Not mentioned is the situation of the large “floating population” of informal rural‐to‐urban migrants.) In rural areas, reliance on family support perforce continues: in 2003, only 2 million farmers are reported as drawing old‐age pensions. A safety‐net provision for the destitute elderly with no family provides for another 2.5 million. The document mentions various experimental schemes in rural areas. One, for medical insurance, covers 95 million residents; another offers an annual “reward” to those over 60 who have only one child (or two girls). The excerpts comprise sections I (Old‐age Insurance) and X (Social Security in Rural Areas) and the Conclusion of the White Paper, China's Social Security and Its Policy, issued by the Information Office of the State Council, Beijing, September 2004.     

Between the look (la mirada) and the Escape (la fuga): the imaging of women in Solanas' La hora de los hornos and Tangos/El exilio de Gardel

This paper revisits the issues raised in debates on the politics of recognition from the point of view of media practitioners and their experiences in covering women's issues and perspectives. It explores the concerns regarding the attempts to improve media coverage of women's issues and perspectives by looking into one particular women's programme, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. The analysis is based primarily on interviews with members of the Woman's Hour's team and complemented by basic information on the presence of different subject areas and speakers in a sample of actual programming. The paper explores the criteria employed by journalists in their day-to-day decisions regarding the issues and approaches appropriate for the specialist women's programme. It discusses interviewees' definitions of Woman's Hour items and the three main factors that influence their selection of issues and the ways to approach them. The first factor concerns the identity of the programme: its issues, voices, and their diversity. The second factor is the listeners or, more broadly, the public and the ways it shapes Woman's Hour. The third factor is the professional and institutional context of the programme. The concluding discussion examines the ways in which Woman's Hour combines or oscillates between recognition and deconstruction of women's/gender identities, producers' interests and the perceived interests of their audiences, and feminist politics and journalistic principles.     

Family allowances and fertility: Socioeconomic differences

This article explores socioeconomic differences in the effect of family allowances on fertility. Although several studies have examined the relationship between cash benefits and fertility, few studies have addressed the possible differential effects of cash benefits on families of different income or education levels. I reconstructed the birth histories of women in the past two Israeli censuses of 1983 and 1995 to study socioeconomic differences in the effect of family allowances up to the seventh parity. The results indicate that family allowances have a significant effect at every parity. Using female education as an indicator of socioeconomic status, I find that socioeconomic status is a significant modifier of the effect of family allowances. Family allowances seem to have a relatively large impact on more-educated women.     

A Transaction Cost Approach to Outsourcing by Households

Below‐replacement fertility and late marriage reflect, in part, the incompatibility of women's family and paid work roles. The outsourcing of childcare and housework to market and state service providers offers a strategy for reconciling work–family conflicts. By referring to the household as an organizational unit, I use the transaction cost approach (TCA) of organizational economics to discuss the factors that facilitate or impede outsourcing by households. In my analysis the frequency, specificity, and uncertainty level of the transaction, as well as normative and social beliefs, can facilitate or impede the household's decision to outsource. Monetary considerations, preferences, and government policies might moderate the effect of the transaction cost on this decision. The analysis further demonstrates that gender is an important factor, because transaction costs are often not distributed equally within households.     

Reproductive control in apartheid South Africa

Since its inception in 1974, the South African family planning programme has been widely believed to be linked with white fears of growing black numbers. The programme has been repeatedly attacked by detractors as a programme of social and political control. Yet, in spite of the hostile environment, black women's use of services has steadily increased. Using historical and anthropological evidence, this paper delineates the links between the social and political context of racial domination and individual fertility behaviour. It is argued that the quantitative success of the family planning programme is rooted in social and economic shifts conditioning reproductive authority and fertility decision-making. State policies of racial segregation and influx control, ethnic 'homeland' politics, and labour migration of men transformed opportunities and constraints for black women and men, and altered local and household expectations of childbearing. Women came to manage their own fertility as they increasingly found themselves in precarious social and economic circumstances.     

Charles Henry Pearson on the Decline of the Family

A common observation and frequent lament about family change in contemporary societies is of the shift of childraising responsibilities from parents to the state. This shift (and what might be done to reverse it) was a theme, for example, of James S. Coleman's 1992 presidential address to the American Sociological Association. In the new circumstances, said Coleman, “carrying the family's honor into the future is less important”; in many families adolescent children “are abandoned psychologically and socially.” The state, however, still has “strong interests in maximizing a child's value to society, or minimizing its cost.” A century before Coleman, Charles Henry Pearson, in the passage reproduced below from his book National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), wrote of the decline of the family in quite similar terms. He argued that state intervention was undertaken only reluctantly, a byproduct of changes in conjugal relations from arranged marriages to “marriages of inclination,” along with easier divorce, and consequent lessening of parental interest in the family line. The state, almost by default, needed to assert the public interest in the raising of children, even though its measures, notably compulsory education, further eroded parents' rights over their children and children's sense of duty and obligation to their parents. While Pearson mostly welcomed the gender equity and individualism he saw emerging, he regretted their effect on the family—on what he termed (metaphorically) “the religion of household life.” His prescient forecast was of “a state of things in which marriages will be contracted without reflection, and broken up without scruple, in which children will be cared for when they are young with, it may be, even more tenderness than of old, but with incomparably less anxiety to fit them for the moral obligations of life, and in which the claim of parents to be obeyed will cease with the children's need of support.” His conclusion: “Family life will be a gracious and decorative incident in the system of such a society; but the family, as a constituent part of the State, as the matrix in which character is moulded, will lose its importance as the clan and the city have done.” Charles Henry Pearson (1830–94) was a British historian who had a second career as an educationist and politician in the colony of Victoria in pre‐Federation Australia. Educated in London and Oxford, he was appointed professor of modern history at King's College, London. His early work included travel writings and a well‐received History of England during the Early and Middle Ages (1867). When his academic career stalled (partly because of very poor eyesight) he emigrated to Australia, where he became closely involved with educational issues. He was elected to the Victorian legislature and was for a time minister of education, able to put into practice his firm views favoring secular education. (See his remark below that Church‐run schools “have generally been strong enough to exclude competition, [but] not rich or enlightened enough to use their monopoly well.”) In 1892 he returned to England, and the following year published National Life and Character. This work, widely read and praised at the time, went through several editions over the next two decades. It essayed forecasts in various domains of society and politics, including a prediction (couched in elitist language) of the passing of the ascendancy of European peoples as other nations grew in numbers and strength (“We shall awake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside,…”). The excerpt is from pages 261–270 of Chapter 5, “The Decline of the Family,” in National Life and Character: A Forecast (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893).     

Population, investment, and population quality]

The estimated cost of raising a child in China from birth to 16 years in 1978 was 6907 Yuan in cities, 4830 Yuan in townships, and 1630 Yuan in rural areas, which included both family costs and costs to the public. In 1985, this cost increased 2.79 times in cities, 0.46 times in townships, and 1.39 times in rural areas in real terms. It was also discovered from a survey in 1986 that in the rural areas, the family cost has increased and the cost to the public decreased since 1978. While in the cities, public cost increased and family cost decreased. In comparing 1985 with 1978, it was also discovered that living expenses were still a major part of the cost. But in the cities, the proportion of the cost attributable to living expenses decreased, while educational and medical expenses increased. In the rural areas, the reverse occurred. In terms of investment in education, the large proportion is the public input. IN 1979, family input was 16.5% in rural areas, 28.7% in cities, and 21.4% in townships. In 1985, family input in educational expenses was 10.4% in urban area and 27.4% in rural areas of Beijing. The small proportion of expenditures in education reflects the negligence of education on the part of both the State and families. Number of parents consider that it does not pay to have their children going to schools, and more education means a bigger loss. This is the reason for 7 million primary and middle school drop outs each year in recent years. In order to improve population quality, it is important to reverse this situation.     

Emphasizing ideological education, implementing birth control measures and carrying out family planning in an appropriate way]

Since the establishment of responsible production system, certain existing measures for family planning have lost their original effectiveness. At the same time, some changes in the peasants' minds concerning family planning have also taken place. Many peasant families, especially those which have no male child, wish to have more children. In order to solve this problem, family planning work should be done all over again from the lowest administrative level. Through correct population and ideological education, the general public may understand that there is a surplus of agricultural labor and a shortage of arable land at the present time. Secondly, birth control measures, family planning techniques, and training of medical personnel should be improved in order to serve the people better. A full-time working staff for family planning work should be increased so that they may work closely with local people and solve practical problems. In addition, nursing homes should be established and managed well in each commune. All such nursing homes should receive financial support from the State. In the this way, childless aging people may receive proper care after retirement. The worries of those single-child households may also be greatly reduced. The overall resistance met by family planning personnel is thus eliminated.     

Unanticipated Consequences: A Comparison of Expected and Actual Retirement Timing Among Older Women

ABSTRACT

The present study adds to the growing body of literature on women and retirement by means of a comparative analysis of the factors associated with anticipated retirement timing (among pre-retirees) and actual retirement timing (among retirees). Adopting a political economy of aging perspective, we argue that socially-structured patterns of gender inequality related to women's multiple roles across the life course affect patterns of retirement timing. Specifically, we hypothesize that the gendered nature of women's work-retirement decision-making is unanticipated during pre-retirement years. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data drawn from a sample of 275 women aged 45 and older living in the Vancouver area of British Columbia. A central finding is that while actual timing of retirement is affected by family caregiving responsibilities and by health/stress factors, pre-retirees do not perceive these to be important in their own expected retirement timing. Implications for social policy, education, and women's financial and psychological well-being in old age are elaborated.     

A comment on ‘social and economic factors in Hong Kong's fertility decline’ by Sui-Ying Wat and R. W. Hodge

The recent article by Wat and Hodge appears to make incorrect inferences about the relation of certain social and economic indicators (infant mortality, employment opportunities for women, and education) to Hong Kong's fertility decline, based on a multiple regression of these variables to the crude birth rate of Hong Kong for 1951–1967. Such modernization measures probably have at least a long-run causal relation to fertility decline. It is also possible that the family planning programme ofHong Kong may have added little to the effects, as the authors suggest. However, I do not believe that their multiple regression analysis establishes these conclusions.     

城市低保措施满意率的影响因素分析

中国城市居民最低生活保障制度作为社会最后一道"安全网",为社会的稳定发挥了举足轻重的作用。政府为低保政策做出了巨大的努力,但是仍有低保对象对低保措施不满意。为提高低保措施的满意率、增强低保制度的实施效果,本文对影响城市低保措施满意率的因素进行探讨分析。研究采用系统和整群抽样方法对徐州市445名低保对象进行入户调查,调查内容包括一般情况和症状自评量表(SCL-90)。结果显示影响城市低保措施满意率的因素是对生活质量、自身潜在价值的期望值和强大的生存压力。