Limiting population growth would have facilitated capital growth and educational services to the labor force. If more people were to leave the labor force than enter it, capital per laborer would increase.
The Chinese government appears to have pursued the first and third options: increasing gross domestic savings and limiting crude birth rates. [2] Gross domestic savings was already at 34% of GDP in 1980, which is high relative to other third world countries, and ends at 40%, in 1999 [3]. The crude birth rate was 18.2 and 15.6 births per 1000 people in 1980 and 1999 respectively. Although this number may seem small, if the crude birth rate had instantaneous dropped by 1 birth per thousand in 1980, the decrease in the number of total births would have been around 980,000 births. The severity of the policy's effects have been argued as appropriate considering the potential crisis of overpopulation that China faced. .
China's population has grown dramatically during the last century. "The total population of mainland China has increased from 542,000,000 in 1949 to 1,236,260,000 by the end of 1997" (Peng 13). To compare China's population to that of the United States, the current population of the US is 290,000,000; clearly, China faces many complications of overpopulation (US Census Bureau). Although the current population is around 1.3 billion, it is estimated that the "current reductions in Chinese fertility have already reduced world population growth by 250 million" (Lee 11). .
The population reduction program started in the 1970's to stem the enormous population from outgrowing their resource base. While The One-Child Policy has limited the number of births in China, it has not had the same affect as the fertility transition of the 1970's. In the 1970's "the Chinese government introduced a national family planning programme that promoted a policy of later birth, longer spacing, and fewer births" (Peng 25).
