An editorial in the
Southern Metropolis Daily calls for policy efforts to boost China's flagging fertility rate amid growing labor shortage fears.
The editorial cites China's National Bureau of Statistics, which showed that the fertility rate actually decreased last year despite the country's long-running one-child policy being replaced with a two-child policy from January 2016.
It’s time for the government to reevaluate whether any restriction on the number of children a family can have is appropriate, and make efforts to end discrimination against children born outside of marriage, the editorial says.
It also endorses calls from the public to cut taxes and offer subsidies to families with children. Currently, taxes in China are collected per individual rather than per family, which discourages some people from having more children due to financial concerns.
Citing the research of Liang Jianzhang, the founder of leading Chinese tourism site Ctrip and now an economics professor at Peking University, the editorial says if government education investment accounts for 5 percent of total GDP and elder care expenditure 15 percent, raising a child will mean receiving an education subsidy worth 5 percent of one’s income but contributing 15 percent of that income to elder care in the future.
To be fair, it goes on, the government needs to offer each child a subsidy worth as much as 10 percent of China’s income per capita to make up for a family’s contribution to social welfare.