Because China has been an agrarian society for a long time, in the traditional concept of the Chinese, families with many children can be regarded as prosperous.
Because of this, China was the world's most populous country for a long time, and even when family planning only allowed one child, many people preferred to risk being fined and not being able to be promoted.
But in the last two years, the situation has changed, and many people originally thought that China could only be troubled by the large population, and would not encounter the problem of a small population.
However, the declining number of births in the past two years has taught people a difficult fact: China is about to fall into a situation where there is no one.
In 2017, there were 17 million births in China, but in 2018 it dropped to 15 million, and in 2021 there were only 10 million births.
In order to save the birth rate, China's family planning policy has also made changes, and in 2021, the three-child policy will be fully opened, and everyone can have three children.
However, even so, our fertility rate has not changed, and by 2023, the number of births has just reached 9 million.
In the face of this situation, in order to save the fertility rate, some experts once again gave a solution, so what is this plan? Will it be possible to restore the fertility rate in our country?
According to a report by the Economic Observer on February 21, the team of prominent population economist Liang Jianzhang published a report called "China's Fertility Cost Report 2024 Edition."
The content in this report is relatively rich, focusing on one of the major reasons why people are reluctant to have children, that is, the cost of childbirth.
And they don't just mention this concept in the article, but talk about the various expenses that will be encountered in the process of raising children.
Not only that, but the report also lists detailed data according to different situations, and then gives some solutions.
Some people who didn't particularly understand why young people don't have children said after reading the report that they finally understood their thoughts.
Because according to the report, the cost of having a child is too high, and it is not at all something that the average family can afford.
According to reports, the average cost of having a child and raising it until the age of seventeen is $5380,000 yuan, and the cost of urban areas is relatively high, and one to three children are 10,000 yuan.
Comparatively speaking, the cost of rural areas is a little lower, but it is still very high, from one child to three children is 10,000, which also shows a decreasing trend.
The reason why this situation occurs is because when people give birth to a child, even if there are elderly people who have given birth to children, they still have little experience and are prone to detours, so the cost will naturally become high.
At the same time, many things that need to be used for the first child can still be used after the second child is born in the future, which further reduces the cost of childbirth.
In any case, this figure is already very shocking, after all, this is still raising the child until the age of seventeen, and does not count the expenses after that.
After all, in modern society, as long as we raise a child, even if he grows up to the age of eighteen, we will not care, but need to continue to let him go to college.
If it is a boy, if you want your child to get married, you need to prepare a house, a car, and in some places, you need to prepare a bride price for the woman.
Originally, the cost of raising a child had already paid for half a house, and then there was such a large expense, so naturally many people were unwilling to have children.
What's more, raising a child is not just a matter of spending money, but also a considerable amount of time and opportunity costs.
After all, having children limits our careers, and we may not be able to get better opportunities because of this, and we don't have enough time to work hard for our careers.
For this situation, Liang Jianzhang's team also gave a more complete suggestion, and he believes that these problems exist objectively.
Therefore, if we want to increase the fertility rate, we need to provide corresponding institutions and financial support on these issues to help people raise their own children.
First of all, there are some suggestions on policy, Liang Jianzhang's team proposes that the first thing is to protect women's reproductive rights, and more specifically, to ensure that women can take maternity leave smoothly.
We also know that although there are relevant regulations on maternity leave for women in China, it is still very difficult to implement, and even many women will be discriminated against when applying for jobs.
Then it's about promoting a more flexible way of working, which is the way we have been working from home in recent years.
Because working from home is significantly more conducive to balancing work and life than having to work in a company, and it will also reduce a lot of time costs for raising children.
In addition to the policy aspect, the reason why Liang Jianzhang was able to get the support of many netizens and parents is also because he also put forward a lot of financial support.
The first is the most direct financial support, his team proposes to directly subsidize families with two children to 1,000 yuan a month, and families with three children to 2,000 yuan a month.
At the same time, it can also give some personal income tax and social security support to these families with multiple children, such as halving for families with two children, and directly exempting those with three children.
In this way, if you have three children, you can receive 200 yuan per month in addition to your own salary, and at the same time, the way of working is easier, and the corresponding benefits will not be reduced.
After that, he also made some suggestions on the long-standing problem of people today, that is, the housing problem, and suggested that the mortgage interest should be returned directly to the two-child and three-child families.
As for the strength of the return, it is the same as above, half of the second child will be returned, and the third child will be returned in full.
Even so, in some places where housing prices are relatively high, there will be situations where people cannot afford to buy a house even if they get the reduction.
So he also suggested that in some places where housing prices are relatively high, families with children can buy some discounts, one child can give a nine-percent discount, two is a seven-fold discount, if there are three children, you can achieve half price to buy a house.
According to Liang Jianzhang's calculations, through these measures, not only can the decline in fertility be reversed, but also the current fertility rate can be greatly improved.
This would allow for more than four million more births per year, which is definitely a good sign for those who have not yet reached the level of the early two millennia.
In fact, if we take a closer look, Liang Jianzhang's measures have not completely solved the current reasons why people are reluctant to have children, otherwise it would not just increase the number of births by 4 million.
The reason why people are reluctant to raise children today is nothing more than the four mountains pressing on people's bodies, pressing people out of breath.
And this first mountain is economic pressure, which Liang Jianzhang gave in his suggestion, which has been greatly alleviated through direct subsidies.
In this way, whether it is the child's material or spiritual life, or what diseases he encounters, he can get certain financial help.
In modern society, having a child is not just a simple matter of multiple children with more pairs of chopsticks, but also needs to give the child a fixed residence, after all, no one wants their children to live without a fixed place in the future.
Therefore, the housing pressure on this second point is also very large, but in the suggestions given by Liang Jianzhang's team, there has also been a certain improvement, and even the problem of different housing prices in different areas has been considered.
Even so, there are still some problems that have not been significantly improved, including the pension problem that many people are very worried about.
In the past, a large part of the reason why people had children was because in the agrarian society, the phrase raising children to prevent old age was indeed true.
But now our pension does not depend on whether we have children, but on whether we have paid social security in time and in full.
It may even be because of the need to raise children, resulting in having to use the money that could have been used to support oneself to raise children, and one's children have to run for life when they grow up, and in the end, because of their children, they will reduce the quality of life in their old age.
Finally, many families in China are facing the problem of education, although China has implemented a compulsory education system, but many parents in order to let their children win at the starting line, and choose to let their children learn a variety of interests, as well as extracurricular cram schools.
In this way, the physical and mental health of the child will be affected, not to mention, and a lot of manpower and financial resources will be paid, and in the end, because everyone has chosen this path, their own children are not much better than other people's children.
However, this does not mean that these suggestions are completely useless, and in fact some of our regions have already started similar policies.
For example, some regions or cities have started to give money to families that harm them, but these policies have been implemented since 2022, and if they are effective, they can be seen in the fertility rate in 2023, but it turns out that this policy is not of much use.