NEWS
2024.11.11
【Report】 The 72nd AJI Frontier Seminar was held! Dr. Variya Kunapasut, presented “The Spillover Effects of Population Control Policies: Empirical Evidence from Vietnam”
The 72nd AJI Frontier Seminar was held online on Tuesday, October 8, 2024. In this seminar, Dr. Variya Kunapasut, a Senior Researcher at Ritsumeikan Asia-Japan Research Organization, gave a presentation titled “The Spillover Effects of Population Control Policies: Empirical Evidence from Vietnam.”
Dr. Variya is researching the effects of Vietnam’s policies to regulate its population growth on fertility, and family size. She began her presentation by explaining that the world’s population increased from 5 billion in 1986 to 7.8 billion in 2020, and several countries such as India and China have attempted to slow their rapid population growth. Among them, Vietnam, with a fertility rate exceeding 6 children per female introduced birth control in the 1960s and announced a strict two-child policy in August 1989 targeting the Khin who comprised its ethnic majority, and also public employees. Those who complied with this policy were rewarded while families who violated it were punished.
Her research is the first to include the spillover effects of Vietnam’s two-child policy, as previous studies have not considered the effect on ethnic minorities who were not targeted, resulting in challenges to comprehensively assessing the policy’s effects. Using data from the 2009 Vietnam Census focusing on children born 10 months after the policy’s introduction in August 1989, she used a regression discontinuity design approach to investigate the effects of the policy on the probability of being born a single child or having up to one sibling.
Dr. Variya explained her empirical methodology clearly, showing how the estimates were calculated using Triangular Kernel regression, a polynomial degree order of 1, and an optimal bandwidth to achieve the most accurate results. She demonstrated her findings with charts and graphs, clearly illustrating that the probability of being born a single child or having only on sibling was true for the Khin and non-Khin, public servants and civilians, thus confirming the existence of a significant spillover effect.
She then proceeded to explain that the two-child policy’s unpredicted spillover effect could be due to changes in social norms and attitudes towards family planning. Even the untargeted groups voluntarily adopted the family planning measures encouraged by the policy, especially as planning units were established across the country to supply free birth control tools. She further attested that the policy had a much larger effect on public servants due to the stricter punishments and monitoring methods that were imposed on them.
Her study challenges the assumption that the non-targeted group were not immune to the influence of the family planning policy, thus highlighting the inadequacies of previous studies that used them as a control group in their design, assuming that they were unaffected.
This interesting presentation was followed by a dynamic Q&A session, in which Dr. Variya discussed the audiences’ comments and answered questions on the reasons for her data selection and what the Vietnamese government did to assist populations in rural areas to conform to its strict two-child policy. Her clear explanations made this seminar a great success.
Dr. Variya delivering her presentation
Please visit the following link for previous AJI Frontier Seminars:
https://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/research/aji/young_researcher/seminar/archive/