The Impact Of Two-child Policy On Female’s Labor Force Participation And Income

Nowadays,China’s population situation has undergone a huge change from a country with high birth rate,high death rate and high natural growth rate to a country with low birth rate,low death rate and low natural growth rate.At the same time,China is facing serious problems of aging population,small number of children and gender imbalance.Therefore,the family planning policy has not met the requirements of The Times.Therefore,China began to adjust its birth policy.In 2013,it proposed the "Selective Two-Child Policy",stipulating that a couple can have a second child if at least one of them is an only child.In the first half of 2014,all provinces began to implement the "one-child two-child" policy.The two-child policy allows eligible couples to have a second child,which can release their potential fertility intention,promote population growth and effectively alleviate the problem of population aging.However,the implementation of the two-child policy may lead to a further aggravation of women’s reproductive burden,which makes women face more serious career difficulties,thus hitting their income.At the same time,the impact on women’s income may in turn affect the implementation of the fertility policy.Therefore,in order to ensure the expected effect of the one-child policy,it is necessary to pay attention to the possible impact of the two-child policy on women’s labor participation and income.This paper selects the data of The Chinese Family Tracking Survey(CFPS)and uses the differential difference model to study the impact of the "one-child two-child" policy on women’s labor participation and income.The results show that,first of all,the policy has a significant negative impact on women’s labor participation and reduces their annual income by14%.After adjusting the sample selection bias,we find that the policy reduces women’s annual income by 16.6%.Secondly,the effect of the policy is heterogeneous: the income impact of the "two-child policy" on women under 35 years old,women with higher education,married women,women with agricultural household registration,women working in non-state-owned sectors,women in eastern regions and women in the tertiary industry is greater.Then,all of the above results passed the robustness test.By replacing income indicators and different samples,the results remained robust.Finally,we further analyze the influence mechanism of the twochild policy on women’s income,focusing on the impact of discrimination mechanism.At the same time,the data all passed the parallel trend test,indicating that before the implementation of the policy,there was no significant difference in the trend of female labor force participation rate and income level between the experimental group and the control group.Therefore,in order to give full play to the effect of the two-child policy and reduce the impact on women’s career,this paper suggests that the country should further share women’s birth costs and constantly improve the female birth security system,so as to achieve a win-win situation.