Desirable properties of an unconventional population control policy

Abstract A great deal of concern has now been expressed about the authoritarian population control policies adopted by Asian countries such as Vietnam, India, and particularly China. Many of these autocratic policies and certainly the Chinese 'one child policy' have failed in part because the framers of these policies have attempted to unsuccessfully circumvent a long standing cultural desire for male children. Therefore, in this note, we first propose an unconventional population control policy that is sensitive to this cultural desire for male progeny. Next, we show that this policy is desirable because: (i) it is likely to ameliorate the "missing girls" problem, (ii) it leads to an equal proportion of females and males in the overall national population, and (iii) its adoption will eventually result in replacement fertility rates in the nation under study. ********** In recent times, a great deal of concern has been expressed about the authoritarian population control policies adopted by Asian countries such as Vietnam, India, and particularly China. In Vietnam, after many years of encouraging family planning, in 1988, the government formally put in place a comprehensive population control policy that called on most parents to restrict themselves to one or two children. As noted by Goodkind (1995), enforcement mechanisms used by the government to enforce its policy have included strong social pressure, fines, and for government cadres, loss of jobs. Although population control policies in India are now largely voluntary, this was not always the case. In particular, in the aftermath of the declaration of a state of emergency on 26 June 1975, the Congress government of Indira Gandhi began to implement its draconian population control policy with uncommon zeal. As Gwatkin (1979) and Pai Panandiker and Umashankar (1994) have pointed out, the number of sterilizations rose from 1.3 million in 1974-1975 to 2.6 million in 19751976 and then shot up to 8.1 million in 1976-1977. In this context, it is important to recognize that the "government focused almost entirely on use of sterilization to reduce fertility; IUD and condom use showed little increase" (Panandiker and Umashankar 1994:91). As a result of the overzealous implementation of sterilization targets, there was popular discontent against the government's policy and this discontent frequently led to widespread violence. The net result of all this was that the Congress government of Indira Gandhi lost the next general election in 1977, the Janata Party came to power and this party promptly instituted a voluntary population control policy. The Vietnamese and the Indian experiences notwithstanding, no population control policy in recent times has achieved as much notoriety as has the Chinese "one child policy." The rapid population growth that occurred after the Communist Party came to power in China put a strain on the government's efforts to assist its people. So, with the twin aims of combating pervasive poverty and improving the quality of people's lives, the one child policy was adopted in 1979. Although this policy has occasionally been praised, it has, just as frequently, been reviled as a tool for human rights abuses. In this regard, Johansson and Nygren (1991) and Johnson (1996) have persuasively argued that the one child policy has led to widespread female infant abandonment, to female infanticide, and to the resultant problem of "missing girls". (1) In addition, Faison (1997) and others have pointed out that some Chinese couples have exploited loopholes in the law and have thereby effectively broken the one child rule. In sum, even though the one child policy has had some success in decelerating population growth in China, the price of this success "in China has indeed been high in recent years" (Johnson 1996:91). Thus far, we have been talking about population and population control policy at the level of a nation. …