The relationship between child care responsibilities and female labor supply in china

In China, public child care services offered by working units used to enable Chinese women to maintain a high labor force participation rate. However, the transition to a market economy since the 1980s has resulted in substantial cuts in governmental support for child care. Women have had to face the discord between the roles of care giver and income earner. The declining female labor force participation rate has raised policy concerns about child care's impact. This paper employs a panel data set for the years 2004, 2006, 2009 and 2011 from the China Health and Nutrition Survey to examine the relationship between child care responsibilities and female labor supply. The analyses show that taking up child care has a negative relationship with both female labor force participation rate and their working hours per week. The magnitude of this relationship is especially large for rural women. These findings confirm the existence of a negative relationship between child care responsibilities and female labor supply and suggest the need for policies to help working mothers to meet their child care obligations.