关键词: 生育意愿, 育儿成本, 社会信任, 社交网络, 强关系

Abstract:

Individual fertility intention is affected by the cost of childcare and the social security system. However, at present, there is a lack of attention and research on the impact of the informal social security. This paper regards the social capital as an informal social insurance. Based on the data of 2015 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), the paper empirically analyses the influence of the individual social capital on the fertility intention of women who are vital to fertility. From the perspective of resource acquisition, if individuals think that they can obtain more social capital, they will feel more secure. However, opposite effects may occur: on the one hand, the social capital may reduce the importance of “raising children to care for you when you get old”, namely, women of childbearing age believe that old-age pension has been guaranteed to a certain extent and have no desire to have more children; on the other hand, the social capital promotes women’s fertility willingness through the socialization of childcare costs. This paper pays close attention to which effect occupies the dominant position in the current society.
In the detailed study, individual social capital can be measured by social trust and social network. Generalized trust often makes people have higher expectations for the resources and help that they can get from others (even strangers). Meanwhile, extensive social network often means that individuals have rich social resources, which is conducive to avoiding risks and solving problems. This paper not only measures the overall situation of social network and social trust of the sample individuals, but also pays attention to the possible different effects of different types of relationships by taking kinship as a strong tie and friendship as a weak tie. In order to make the results more robust, the paper uses the instrumental variable method to solve the potential endogenous problem of social trust. According to the variable types, the model is re-estimated by Conditional Mixed Process (CMP).
The results show that the social capital does have significant impacts on women’s fertility intention. First, whether in high-income families or low-income families, the impact of the social capital on fertility willingness is positive. This result shows that its main function is to reduce the cost of childcare rather than form a certain old-age security, otherwise the regression coefficients should be negative, namely, women of childbearing age believe that the importance of “raising children to care for you when you get old” is declining with the increase of the available social capital. Second,different relationships in the social network have different effects on women’s fertility intention. The expectations of the personal social capital brought by different relationships are diverse. Kinship as a strong tie tends to improve women’s fertility willingness, while friendship as a weak tie has no significant effect. The instrumental variable method is used to test the robustness, and the results are consistent with those mentioned above. In addition, this paper also discusses the possible interaction between the social capital and other insurances. There is a certain substitution effect between the social capital and the“urban basic medical insurance/ new rural cooperative medical insurance / public medical care”. It further proves the feasibility of treating the social capital as an informal social insurance and the robustness of the results of this paper.
This paper enriches the relevant researches on the influencing factors of the fertility intention from the perspective of the informal security. It clarifies the main effect of the social capital on women’s fertility intention in the current Chinese society, and makes an in-depth study on the impacts of different relationships in social networks on women’s fertility intention. In order to promote the fertility willingness, we can combine the formal social security with the informal security and bring the informal insurance function of the social capital into full play.

Key words: Fertility Intention, Parenting Costs, Trust, Social Network, Strong Tie