Unintended Consequences of China´s One-Child Policy

This paper gives a brief overview of the family planning policy of China which, although being recently relaxed, still controls a large swath of the population. Unofficially known as the “one-child policy”, the policy resulted when the social strife of the 1970s coupled with a Malthusian pessimism concerning the capability of the still largely closed and isolated Chinese economy to care for itself. In this paper we overview the motivations for the policy, the unfortunate demographic future that it will create, and some policy choices that can be undertaken today to alleviate these issues.