One-child policy not main factor in China's birth control: Amartya Sen

In an NYT column, Sen credits development primarily to increasing empowerment of Chinese women

Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen believes that while the one-child policy in China brought in momentous change, the great fall in fertility over the decades, for which the policy is often credited, has, in fact, been less related to compulsion and much more to reasoned family decisions in favour of a new norm of smaller families.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Sen credited the development primarily to the "increasing empowerment of Chinese women through rapid expansion of schooling and job opportunities".

He emphasised that what China needed presently was a further expansion of rethinking within families to overcome the “boy preference,” which he  thinks is still widespread.

Highlighting hard data, Sen argued that while the one-child policy was introduced in 1978, 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.

While the rate continued to fall thanks to the policy in force, 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, sen mentions in his article for NYT.

From this Sen says that something more than the one-child policy has been affecting birth rates in China. In the NYT article, Sen quotes statistics from different countries, to assert that the two most potent factors that induce fertility reduction globally are women’s schooling and women’s paid employment.

Fertility rate declines in China, he says, have been close to what we would expect on the basis of these social influences alone.