The effects on fertility are less simple. If non-egalitarian parents are not subject to social constraints, one possible strategy is to have large numbers of children to increase the chances of having a high-paying child, and then invest only in the most promising child. As Greenhalgh (1988: 655) points out, Chinese families responded to mobility opportunities during the Qing Dynasty by pursuing precisely this strategy: increasing fertility to maximize the number of sons, and then “selecting a son to succeed in education and using the others to finance his advancement.” However, this strategy has become less attractive as the minimum level of education required for any type of social advancement for all individuals has increased, making it more difficult to socially or morally justify such an approach. In fact, current East Asian social conventions require parents to invest heavily in the education of even less well-equipped children, for whom the marginal cost of child quality is higher – otherwise, they are “considered strange” (Lee 2012: 5) and run the risk of being labeled irresponsible (Anderson and Kohler 2012; Hwang, 2001; Lee, 2012; Sorensen, 1994; Tsuya and Choe, 2004). These societal conventions also help explain why such a large proportion of parents (about half in Japan and at least 70% in South Korea) participate in this winner-take-all tournament and why parents` demand for educational contributions seems impervious to profitability: the evidence that observation leads to better academic outcomes is surprisingly weak (Bray and Lykins 2012). Causal models suggest that household spending on observation has minimal impact on test scores in South Korea (Kang 2007). Therefore, the marginal cost of children`s quality may actually be very high (although it is still relatively low in the high-yield scenario compared to other scenarios), so the relentless spending on children`s pre-tertiary education in Japan and South Korea undermines the “subjective/cultural beliefs of both parents about the effectiveness of private education, or concern, that they are perceived by their peers as neglecting children`s education” (Kang 2007:27). With these social expectations, parents may find that their best strategy is to have a small number of children and invest heavily in them. TOKYO (AP) — Japan should end a 120-year-old rule that assumes a baby born within 300 days of a mother`s divorce is her ex-husband`s child, a government panel said Tuesday, an important step that would end a practice widely seen as outdated. In Japan, caring for young and old has traditionally been the responsibility of the family.
This norm has led to conflicts between work and family because of its division of labor. [23] When raising a child, people must have access to workers` income and benefits. Japan`s family policy has changed its policy in response to the growing number of working women, low birth rates and conflicts between working families. Policies aim to free working mothers from the anxiety and stress of raising children[24] and encourage childbirth by offering them maternity leave, part-time jobs and the opportunity to work from home. Finally, a major drawback of the “reverse one-child policy” is its relatively long timetable, so its success depends critically on the ability of policymakers to demonstrate credible long-term commitment. The high frequency of changes in admission policy to higher education in South Korea has led to public distrust (Chang, 2008; Kim and Lee, 2002), particularly in South Korea due to negative historical experiences.7 Nevertheless, we argue that it is necessary to focus on university admission (and not, for example, at the primary school level), in recognition of the main motivation behind educational fever: the economic and social fallout associated with admission to a leading university. Previous political attempts to mitigate preschool education fever by reducing skill bundling in public schools in Japan and assigning students to secondary schools through a lottery system in South Korea have had no effect beyond shifting competition to the private sector (in the form of prestigious private high schools in Japan and parallel training in Korea). from the South) (Kariya & Rosenbaum, 1999; Kim and Lee, 2002) and the increased cost of participation in the winner-take-all tournament. Similarly, critics have objected to a recent proposal to abolish high school entrance exams in Japan by merging middle and high schools, arguing that this plan would shift competition only to primary school age (Okada 1999). In order to shorten the implementation period and increase public credibility, we propose instead to combine “reverse one-child policies” with similar measures that apply to the early stages of children`s educational careers, such as subsidizing the cost of pre-tertiary education or requiring high schools to offer preferential access to children from large families. Although India does not have a strict family planning policy, the Ministry of Health and Family Care advocates that couples have two children with at least three years in between.
In Singapore, the two-child policy was called “Stop at Two” until the 1980s. Given the high stakes, paying high fees for private schools or mock courses is an extremely attractive investment for households. As mentioned above, not all parents choose to participate in this winner-take-all tournament, but about half of Japanese families and a significantly higher proportion of South Korean families do. This high participation rate is all the more extraordinary given that a significant proportion of Japanese parents actually consider Juku to be potentially harmful to their children: 34.0% and 24.5% respectively fear that Juku will have a negative impact on character development and future career choices (OECD 2011). Nevertheless, many of these parents continue to invest in such extracurricular activities, reflecting the extremely high benefits of admission to a top-tier university in terms of future salaries and social status. Theories of economic fertility postulate the dominant “quantity-quality” model of the child, in which the “quality” of the child is often defined as the potential future income of the child. A more realistic definition could instead use the child`s potential household income and include other factors such as social status. We argue below that taking these factors into account would strengthen our conclusions, but for now, let`s continue with the simpler definition.
Like Becker and Tomes (1976), we view the quality of children as a function of (a) giftedness, including “innate” sex and academic talent, and (b) household investment in their health and education. For now, we will focus on parental investments, and later in this section, we will return to the topic of investing children in their own quality. The quality model of the quantity of children assumes that parents allocate their income or budget I between the number of children n, the quality of each child qi and all other consumer goods y in such a way as to maximize their overall utility. For now, let`s assume that all children are equally endowed and parents are egalitarian and prefer all their children to be equally rich so that they invest equally in all children (qi = q). In 2009, the Population Ordinance was amended to further limit the number of children to one or two children, although individuals were allowed to determine the time and distance of their birth. [49] The government is currently working on a new population law to replace the population ordinance in 2015. However, there are disagreements between policymakers and academics over what should be included in the law. [50] Second, as explained in the previous section, future labour market outcomes are highly dependent on the ranking of the university to which an individual is admitted, rather than on their skills acquired at graduation. At a younger age, i.e. the pre-tertiary age is more heavily weighted and “considered critical because school failure cannot be compensated for in later years” (Tsuya and Choe 2004:77).6 We argue that this makes a crucial difference in the educational experiences of Japanese and South Korean parents, as the production of child quality depends more on parental contributions in previous years and more on the contributions of the child in later years (see Figure 2).
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