"China's fertility costs soar to the top in the world, Liang Jianzhang's team calls for a comprehensive reduction in the burden of family parenting to cope with the challenge of low fertility".
Recently, a team led by Liang Jianzhang, co-founder of Trip.com Group and a demographic economist, released the 2024 edition of the China Fertility Cost Report, revealing the heavy financial burden of Chinese families in raising children. According to the report, the average cost of raising a child aged 0-17 in China is as high as 5380,000 yuan, the proportion of this figure relative to per capita GDP is only lower than that of a very few countries such as South Korea in the world, highlighting the huge pressure on childcare in China.
In terms of regional differences, the cost of raising families in Shanghai, Beijing and Zhejiang ranks among the top three in the country, among which the average cost of raising children in Shanghai has exceeded the million yuan mark, reaching 1.01 million yuan, followed by Beijing with 930,000 yuan and Zhejiang with 850,000 yuan. In terms of children, the cost of raising a first, second and third child in urban areas is 660,000 yuan, 520,000 yuan and 390,000 yuan respectively, while the corresponding costs in rural areas are 460,000 yuan, 360,000 yuan and 270,000 yuan respectively. It is worth noting that children aged 3-5 years have the highest annual parenting costs, which are about 360,000 yuan.
However, these statistics are only direct costs, and in reality, there are significant time and opportunity costs involved in raising children, especially for women. Due to society's traditional expectations of the role of mothers, many women struggle to balance their careers while taking on heavy childcare tasks, and are even forced to make difficult choices between work and family, which Liang Jianzhang's team sees as one of the important reasons for China's declining fertility rate.
In the face of the current total fertility rate in China, it has fallen to one of the lowest levels in the world (about 1Liang's team put forward a series of policy recommendations aimed at reducing the burden on families of childbearing age and encouraging childbearing, including cash and tax subsidies, housing subsidies, additional childcare institutions, equal maternity leave for men and women, the introduction of foreign nanny labor, the promotion of flexible office models, and the protection of single women's reproductive rights.
In terms of cash and tax subsidies, the team advocates a monthly cash subsidy of 1,000 yuan per child for two-child families, and halves the income tax and social security subsidies, and increases the monthly subsidy to 2,000 yuan per child for families with three children and above, and exempts all income tax and social security. The team estimates that this series of measures is expected to increase the fertility rate by about 20%, or 2 million new births per year.
In addition, in terms of housing purchase subsidy strategy, they proposed to give substantial support to families in the form of mortgage interest refund or house price discount, such as 50% mortgage interest refund for two-child families, and full refund for three-child families; Or in areas with high housing prices, different children correspond to different range of housing price discounts. It is also expected to boost fertility by 20% and give birth to more new lives.
In response to the problem of high childcare services**, Liang Jianzhang's team suggested that overseas workers, especially nannies from Southeast Asian countries, should be appropriately introduced to alleviate the childcare pressure of urban white-collar families. If 3 million foreign nannies can be introduced, it will be equivalent to saving Chinese families hundreds of billions of yuan in childcare expenditure, which can indirectly increase the fertility rate by about 2%.
The data shows that China's total fertility rate has been declining since 2019, from 152 fell to 1 in 202207, which has entered the lowest fertility rate in the world. If effective measures are not taken to reverse this trend, China's population will decline sharply in the coming decades, leading to a decline in innovation and a loss of overall national strength.
In dealing with the low fertility rate, which is a tough battle related to the long-term development of the nation, can we respond quickly and adopt practical and effective policies to achieve a substantial reduction in the cost of childbirth? How to build a scientific, reasonable, sufficient and wide-ranging fertility support system at the national level, so that every family willing to have children can enjoy tangible benefits, so as to ensure that the Chinese nation can continue to reproduce after thousands of years, and avoid losing its competitive advantage on the world stage due to the sharp decline in population? This is a major issue that our whole society urgently needs to go deep into and put into action. Liang Jianzhang suggested a 5% discount on the housing price of a three-child family