This paper examines the impact of the collective commune institution on rural fertility level in China based on new county-level data collected from County Annals. Making use of the staggered time variations of People’s Commune elimination and one-child-over-all policy implementation at county level, a vacant period is abstracted as the reference group for the institutional treatment analysis. Through empirical estimations, it is suggested that 2 extra births per thousand people are born in rural under the collective commune system than the afterwards times at least in late 1970s and early 1980s. This might mean that there could be about average 1.56 millions additional births in rural China because of one-year lagged of the commune system collapse. To large extent, People’s Commune has...[ Read more ]

This paper examines the impact of the collective commune institution on rural fertility level in China based on new county-level data collected from County Annals. Making use of the staggered time variations of People’s Commune elimination and one-child-over-all policy implementation at county level, a vacant period is abstracted as the reference group for the institutional treatment analysis. Through empirical estimations, it is suggested that 2 extra births per thousand people are born in rural under the collective commune system than the afterwards times at least in late 1970s and early 1980s. This might mean that there could be about average 1.56 millions additional births in rural China because of one-year lagged of the commune system collapse. To large extent, People’s Commune has made the fertility change not that fast in rural China. This study provides a method for effective evaluation of institutional and policy programs in China at lower level districts.