Fertility Intention and Fertility Behavior: Why Stop at One? The Socioeconomic Factors Behind China’s Below Replacement Fertility

Yong Cai, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Feng Wang, University of California, Irvine
Baochang Gu, Renmin University of China
Zhenzhen Zheng, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

While it is often considered as a privilege to have a second child in the context of China’s restrictive one-child policy, many Chinese couples are forgoing the opportunity of having a second child, citing economic factors as main constraints. In this paper, we follow up a cohort of reproductive age women interviewed three years ago in Jiangsu province, China, to examine the relationships among fertility desire, fertility intention and fertility behavior. We seek to undercover how fertility decision is made within the Chinese families and how socioeconomic factors come into play in their reproductive decisions.