Biodemography Soc Biol. 2025 Jul 3:1-27. doi: 10.1080/19485565.2025.2527033. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
Fertility policy directly affects the fertility decisions of residents’ families, and has the greatest impact on the daily lives of China’s residents and on the country’s economic and social development. In recent years, as the demographic situation has changed, China’s fertility policy has undergone a series of adjustments, and the government has implemented different incentives in the legal system, child care, education, and maternity insurance to stimulate fertility intention. This is a major shift in China’s fertility policy from “family planning” to “fertility support.” In the process of policy adjustment, a series of problems emerged. First, the continuous adjustment of the fertility policy causes information gaps among departments at different levels, thus leading to coordination difficulties and a lack of responsibility between the upper and lower levels of policy implementation. Second, the implementation of the two-child policy is ineffective, and its incentive effect fails to meet the expected standard. Therefore, this paper explores the similarities and policy effectiveness of fertility policies and uses the LDA thematic clustering model, cosine similarity distance algorithm, and PMC index evaluation system to quantitatively analyze fertility policies in different periods. The results are as follows: (1) due to changes in China’s demographic structure, China’s fertility policy has adjusted significantly during the universal two-child period, and its policy content and specific measures have changed dramatically compared with those of the previous period, while China’s fertility policy has stabilized during the universal three-child period. (2) In the policy effectiveness evaluation, most policies have undetailed long-, medium-, and short-term goals and lack adequate policy guarantees. Therefore, to build a perfect fertility support system, the government needs to comprehensively consider the synergy of policy measures, the strengthening of policy guarantee programs, and the enhancement of policy effectiveness in the formulation of relevant policies, to continuously make policies more targeted, scientific, and effective.
PMID:40608994 | DOI:10.1080/19485565.2025.2527033
