Recently, the policy of relaxing the “two-child” birth control has obviously met a “cold” response, and China’s population growth is facing a huge risk of “cliff-type”decline. Using text analysis and quasi-experimental method, this paper theoretically and empirically demonstrates the change of fertility costs in urban and rural areas and its influence on fertility rate, and then on the effect of “two-child” fertility policy. The results show that, in recent years, as fertility costs change, the fertility desire of rural families has greatly reduced, while those of urban families has increased slightly, then the fertility desire of urban and rural areas declines in general. At the same time, the actual fertility rate is much lower than the desirable fertility level, so the “two-child” policy fails to achieve satisfactory results. the key to the future population policy reform in China is to draw lessons from the historical experience
of developed countries and eliminate the adverse effects of changes in fertility costs through fertility incentives measures.
Keywords: fertility policy, fertility costs, text analysis, quasi-experimental analysis
China Finance and Economic Review
Volume 7 Number 4 Winter 2018.P71