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PERSONAL TAX EXEMPTION: THE EFFECT ON FERTILITY IN TAIWAN
Author(s) -
HUANG JrTsung
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
the developing economies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.305
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1746-1049
pISSN - 0012-1533
DOI - 10.1111/j.1746-1049.2002.tb00909.x
Subject(s) - citation , welfare , constructive , library science , political science , sociology , psychology , law , computer science , process (computing) , operating system
THE advancing age of Taiwan’s population is regarded as a serious problem that has been a cause for growing concern in recent years. The problem is illustrated by the upward trend in the ratio between the total population and people over the age of sixty-five, and the downward trend of the general fertility rate (GFR, hereafter). Figure 1 shows that the proportion of the total population over the age of sixty-five was 8.19 per cent in 1998, up from around 5.28 per cent in 1986, and this was accompanied by a simultaneous decline in the GFR from 6 per cent in 1986 to 4.3 per cent in 1998. These two distinct features—two of the three features identified by Leete (1987) —have pushed Taiwan, and many other countries in East and Southeast Asia, into a post–demographic transition phase. In an attempt to mitigate this population-aging problem and to avoid some of the socioeconomic issues created by the phenomenon, many regional economists and sociologists now suggest that measures are required to actively encourage people to have more children. In order to provide such encouragement in Taiwan, one first needs to understand the determinants of the people’s demand for children, but there are, of course, many factors that affect fertility behavior. Temperature, for example, has a significant influence on the timing of birth (Seiver 1985; Land and Cantor 1993; Lam and Miron 1996). The economic theory of fertility sees the demand for children mod-