// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Personal incentives for public officials drove a drop in China’s fertility
Jia Yu is at the Center for Social Research, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Search author on:
PubMed
Google Scholar
China’s one-child policy is probably the best-known population-control programme in history, yet in its first decade it barely changed the country’s fertility rate. Writing in Nature, Meng et al.1 show that the biggest drop in fertility after the policy’s introduction was driven by a change in how officials were incentivized to enforce it. This change accounts for about half of the fall in the country’s fertility rate during the 1990s.
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Meng, L., Yang, H., Miller, G. & Li, H. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-11232-w (2026).
Whyte, M. K., Wang, F. & Cai, Y. China J. 74, 144–159 (2015).
Article
PubMed
Google Scholar
Greenhalgh, S. & Winckler, E. A. Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford Univ. Press, 2005).