Population Control in China: The Effect of Regional Variations in One-Child Policy Enforcement on Parental Investment in Children

Abstract

This paper researches the relationship between child quantity and child quality in China. During the late 20th century, child quantity was significantly impacted by the Chinese one-child policy, which consisted of various regional differences in enforcement strictness. Using the China Health and Nutrition survey for the dataset, the regional variations in the one-child policy are studied. The effects of these variations are evaluated by various forms of parental investment – monetary, health, education, and time. This study contributes to existing literature as previous research has focused mainly on outcomes for child quality and not parental investment. In addition, factors such as regional variation and gender are taken into account for empirical analysis. It is hypothesized that the regional effects will be significant. In addition, increasing child quantity and thus disobeying the one-child policy should lead to decreased parental investment. The results show that this holds true for all four measures of parental investment. More specifically, violating the one-child policy has a greater effect relative to that of just having a larger family. The dependent variable most impacted by changes in child quantity is monetary investment.