(especially) more children. After 1984 the government renounced forced ster-
ilization/abortion and often allowed a second child if the first was a girl.
Single-child couples had access to various privileges including preferential
access to day care and schooling. Penalties on families having a third or fourth
child were equal to the annual income of many households, and if families
were unable to pay they risked having their belongings confiscated or house
knocked down. Debate continues about the real impact of this drastic policy.
Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan share a common culture and language
with China but not the one-child policy. Like China these countries have expe-
rienced substantial fertility decline, probably caused by rising education
among women, economic growth and urbanization. Without coercion the
Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu achieved faster reductions in fertility
than China in the 1980s, relying instead on improvements in health and
education, of women and children in particular (Drèze and Sen, 1995:82).
Other influences in China evolved in a direction that would have been
expected to promote low fertility even without the one-child policy. For a low-
income country China has very high female labour force participation, high
female educational attainment,striking educational aspirations for children,
good access to health and contraception,and a relatively good social security
system. Studying these trends led Hussain (2002) to conclude that the urban
TFR in China in the 1990s would probably have been below the replacement
ra te even without a birth-control policy.
William Easterly mocked all such government and donor efforts to reduce
population growth by direct intervention, or as he put it, ‘The most unprepos-
sessing candidate for the Holy Grail of prosperity is seven inches of latex: a
condom’ (2001:87). Easterly argues as follows. The belief that making more
contraception available will reduce fertility is inconsistent with the fact that
people respond to incentives. Why would people risk a birth and lifetime of
child-raising expenses to avoid paying $0.33 (an estimated international price)
for a condom? 90 per cent of actual fertility is explained by the desire for it.
People have more children because they want to and have an incentive to do so
(as explained above under stage two of the demographic transition). The way
to slow population growth, as demonstrated by these empirical findings, is to
invest in people; more education, child and maternal health, more opportuni-
ties for employment.
The phenomenon of missing women
I consider the Easterly argument too optimistic. The phenomenon of missing
women is a catastrophic form of mortality and is not being solved by ‘invest-
ment in people’. Missing women are defined as the ‘additional number of
females who would be alive if there had been equal treatment of the sexes
among the cohorts that are alive today’. The demographic transition theorizes
that mortality falls when income and GDP grow. The phenomenon of missing
92 Sources of Growth in the Modern World Economy since 1950