This paper is divided into six sections. Section one shows why The One-Child Policy was conceived and how it was executed. It also puts forth the non-economic considerations as well as the non-economic consequences. Section two gives a brief view of the debate on the link between population and economics, starting with Malthus and ending with Julian Simon and Gary Becker. Section three presents the methodology of correlating population and income. The fourth section goes over the data used in this paper. The fifth section deals with results of my regression analyses, and the sixth section sums up my conclusions. .
rom the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1950 to the early 1970's, the governmental policy was one that favored a fast growing population. China's former leader, Mao Zedong, believed "that a large and impoverished population was an asset for national development" (Aird 229). Instead of focusing on the population as the source of growth, China's following leader Deng Xiaoping's main axiom was achieving the "four modernizations": agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. His overall goal was to raise the per capita GDP of the population and to make China similar to first world countries.
Modernization became the most important element accomplishing this economic growth. To become a first world country, China needed to raise its GDP per capita by increasing its productivity of workers and increasing its capital per worker ratio. The Chinese government had several options for spurring growth. First, China could have artificially increased its domestic savings rate or real gross domestic investment, which would increase capital accumulation. Second, the government could have chosen to spend more money on educating its people to increase worker productivity. The third choice, which could be used in combination with the other two, was to limit population growth.
