Policy combinations, high-quality population development, and China's economic growth: An endogenous fertility model

This study introduces public childcare policies in an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility for the first time, combining child-rearing and education subsidy policies to examine how these policies impact fertility rates and human capital and influence long-term economic growth rate. Findings reveal that public childcare and child-rearing subsidy policies increase the fertility rate but reduce human capital, whereas education subsidies enhance human capital without increasing the fertility rate. Furthermore, a selective combination of these three types of policies can achieve the highest economic growth. Calibration using Chinese data demonstrates that strengthening these three policies can all increase economic growth rate. The policy combination that achieves the highest economic growth requires increasing public childcare time by 5.11 times and education subsidies by 38.47 times the current levels, while not implementing child-rearing subsidy policies.