Seminar Series: Yong Cai, UNC

This study challenges the conventional wisdom that attributes fertility and its local variation in China as functions of government's birth planning policy. The study compares fertility in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, two of the most developed provinces in China, to examine the relationship between socioeconomic development and low fertility in a global context. My analysis demonstrates that although low fertility in China was achieved under the government's restrictive one-child policy, structural changes brought by socioeconomic development and ideational shifts accompanying the new wave of globalization must have played important roles in China¿s fertility reduction.