http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/opini ... ss&emc=rss
Amartya Sen: Women’s Progress Outdid China’s One-Child Policy
By AMARTYA SENNOV. 2, 2015
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — THE abandonment of the one-child policy in China is a momentous change, and there is much to celebrate in the easing of restrictions on human freedom in a particularly private sphere of life. But we need to recognize that the big fall in fertility in China over the decades, for which the one-child policy is often credited, has, in fact, been less related to compulsion and much more to reasoned family decisions in favor of a new norm of smaller families.
This development has been particularly helped by the increasing empowerment of Chinese women through rapid expansion of schooling and job opportunities. What China needs now is further expansion of rethinking within families to overcome “boy preference,” which is still widespread, despite being at odds with the success of Chinese women.
This is a good moment to examine what the one-child policy has done — or not done. First, we must question the glib history that China was stuck in the adversity of high fertility rates until the policy changed it all.
The one-child policy was introduced in 1978. But the fertility rate had already been falling rapidly for a decade before that — from an average of 5.87 births per woman in 1968 to 2.98 in 1978. After that huge drop, the fertility rate continued to fall with the new draconian policy in force, but there was no plunge — only a smooth continuation of the falling trend that preceded the restriction. From 2.98 in 1978, the rate has declined to 1.67 now.
Clearly, something more than the one-child policy has been affecting birthrates in China. Statistics that compare different countries, as well as empirical analysis of data from hundreds of districts within India, indicate sharply that the two most potent factors that induce fertility reduction globally are women’s schooling and women’s paid employment.
There is no mystery in this. The lives that are most battered by over-frequent bearing and rearing of children are those of young mothers, and more schooling and more gainful employment both give young women a greater voice in family decisions — a voice that tends to work in the direction of cutting down the frequency of births. Rapid expansion in China of education, including that of girls, and the enhancement of job opportunities for young women occurred through a series of decades that began well before the introduction of the one-child policy, and they have continued robustly since.
As it happens, fertility rate declines in China have been close to what we would expect on the basis of these social influences alone. China often gets too much credit from commentators on the alleged effectiveness of its harsher interventions, and far too little for the positive role of its supportive policies (including its heavy focus on education and health care, from which many other countries can learn).
So while there are harrowing reports of the hardship created in the lives of many people in China by the enforcement of the one-child policy, it is far from clear that this policy has had a large impact on the fertility rate of the population as a whole.
The removal of the one-child policy may, in fact, have been an easy choice. There is little need for the harshness of this coercive program, given the increasing role of reasoning about family decisions, and particularly the growing empowerment of Chinese women. ... "
yrs,
rubato