Empirical evidence on the unintended consequences of the one-child policy in terms of child trafficking in China
Faculty Associate Sebastian Galiani, professor from Department of Economics, recently published his NBER working paper titled "Where Have All the Children Gone? An Empirical Study of Child Abandonment and Abduction in China" along with several other chinese scholars from Xiamen University in China.
The research team mainly relied on two sets of data sources: data collected through the self- and family-reported website Baby Come Back Home (BCBH), the largest non-governmental organization in China serving the community of missing children from 1979 to 2018, as well as the income-relative fines for the first unauthorized birth from each province government.
Empirical results suggest that (1) Stricter one-child policy implementation leads to more child abandonment locally and more child abduction in neighboring regions; (2) A stronger son-preference bias in a given region intensifies both the local effects and spatial spillover effects of the region's one-child policy on child abandonment and abduction; and (3) With the gradual relaxation of the one-child policy after 2002, both child abandonment and child abduction have dropped significantly.