Vietnam’s two-child policy in 2008

What was the two-child policy and why was it implemented?

The goal of the two-child policy was to maintain national population growth at 2 percent. This policy applied to every family within Vietnam, except for families that were ethnic minorities, who were allowed to have a third child. In 2008, 86 million people lived in Vietnam, two thirds of whom were under the age of 35. Faced with this baby boom, the government in Vietnam feared that this would cause negative economic and social impacts on the future of Vietnam. In the first nine months of 2008 there was a 10% rise in birth rates from the previous year, sparking official alarm, calling for the two-child policy to be enforced.

Is this policy familiar to the people of Vietnam?

In the 1960s, the same two child policy was introduced in the north of Vietnam, and punishments were enforced to lower the population of the country. For example, payment cuts were given to couples who had a third child. However, following the Vietnam War these restrictions were gradually eased and the population of Vietnam began to grow steadily once more. The policy came into effect for the second time in the 1988 when many of the Vietnamese officials feared that a population boom was on the horizon. The policy was abandoned in 2003 as there was a question of whether this policy violated the principles of family planning. Following this, it was replaced by the Vietnamese government’s encouragement of a “small-family norm”. According to UN sources the fertility rate has since fallen back to 2.1, and in most East Asian countries there has been a rapid fertility decline in recent decades to two children or fewer. So in short, the two child policy was successful then.

Was it successful?

Since the reintroduction of the two-child policy in 2008, figures from Vietnam’s General Office showed that there was a population of 90.5 million people in 2014, but the birth rate in certain provinces had been falling over four years. In 2015 at the National Assembly session in Vietnam, during discussions of whether Vietnamese parents should be allowed to have more than two children, the Head of the General Office for Population Family Planning Mr. Nguyen Van Tan said “If the birth rate gets too low it can be difficult to raise it again, we have seen what has happened in many nearby countries such as South Korea and Japan.”

This poses the question of whether this policy should be relaxed, as it is still in place today, and population researchers in Vietnam have provided three separate scenarios for Vietnam’s population size. In the first scenario, if the birth rate continues to fall with the policy, the country’s population will be 99 million by 2049. In the second scenario, if current birth rates are maintained, the population will be between 105 and 110 million by 2049. In the third, with the policy relaxed, the population will be 120 million by 2049. Whilst opinions differ on these three scenarios, Mr Tan commented “Vietnam still needs to control its birth rate but how to do this appropriately without reducing the birth rate is a problem.”

Taken from the Journal of Population Economics

Effects of Vietnam's Two-child Policy on fertility, son preference and female labour supply

How does this compare to China’s one-child policy?

China had been actively influencing its population growth for several years, beginning after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. China’s population was encouraged, by officials, to grow to increase manpower, and although no official policy was put in place, government propaganda condemned contraceptives, and as a result the population doubled over the next twenty years.

However, this did not come without consequences.

Due to the population’s rapid increase, food supply became scarce and from 1959 to 1961 a famine killed an estimated 15 – 30 million people. As a result, the government introduced a one-child policy, and if the people did not adhere to the policy, they would face the possibility of sterilisations, abortions, and similar to Vietnam’s two-child policy – they would be fined harshly. There had been several initiatives for birth control before the one-child policy was introduced, which had achieved large reductions in the national birth rate. Despite this, the large drop began to level off after 1976, prompting officials to seek more drastic measures, and in 1979 the Chinese government officially established their one-child policy.

In contrast to Vietnam’s two-child policy, the Chinese government increased the legal age for marriage in China to 22 years for men, and 20 years for women with the hope that this too would help to decrease the birth rate.

The birth rate in China fell from 1979 onwards, and the rate of population growth dropped to 0.7%. Although this seemed positive, due to traditional cultural preference for boys, large numbers of female babies ended up homeless or in orphanages, and in some cases they were even killed. In 2000, it was reported that 90% of foetuses aborted in China were female. As expected, this had drastic effects on the gender balance of the Chinese population, and today it is estimated that men outnumber women by more than 60 million.

To conclude, when looking at the figures and percentages from both Vietnam’s two-child policy and China’s one-child policy, it is clear to see that the actions of both of the country’s governments were effective, as they both achieved their aims: to decrease the birth rate. Personally, I believe that Vietnam’s approaches to tackling the increase in birth rate in all of the years 1960, 1988, and 2008, were more effective in the long term than China’s approach. However, the situation in China was significantly more concerning than Vietnam, and as today China has a population of 1.4 billion, and Vietnam 95.54 million, it is clear that China had a much larger scaled problem than Vietnam. It can be said that the crisis in China in 1951 could perhaps be looked at as an example of what the situation in Vietnam would have been, had the Vietnamese government not taken any action.