한국아동패널 자료를 활용한 출산 결정요인 분석

Abstract

As low fertility rate and late marriage have become serious social issues in Korea, a lot of studies have been conducted to find out the reasons and draw policy steps to aggress them. Existing studies have indicated that the low birth rate in Korea is due to the increase of opportunity cost of childbirth, increased child rearing expenses, and conflicts between work and family since increasing number of women get higher education. A lot of attempts have been made such as financial support and educational support for those who raise young children. This study aims to focus on the effect of Early Childhood Education and Care(ECEC) on the Korean women’s decision-making of childbirth, which have been adopted throughout the country among various childbirth support policies. Financial support for caring and educating children is to support childrearing expenses to reduce the expected amount of money that prospect parents take into account when they thought about having children. This study used materials coupled with Panel Study of Korean Children (PSKC) and Korea Longitudinal Study of Women and Families (KLoWF) to analyze the relationship between the actural childbirth and prospect nurturing costs rather directly. The method of kernel matching was used to analyze the information of childbirth history coupled with nurturing environment and cost included in Panel Study of Korean Children (PSKC). The results in this study suggested that there is a very weak relationship between prospect cost and the actural childbirth, which was more distinct in low-education and low-income class. But in this class, the relationship is still weak. This can be a simultaneous impact from various factors on childbirth intention as well as technical limitations adopted in this study. Furthermore, as nurturing cost used in this study only captures direct costs paid to child support institutions when children were 3 to 7 years old (before they enter elementary school), it does not capture the entire costs expected throughout the whole life-cycle. In other words, while the results of this study suggest that the supports for child rearing costs and education cost do not have a significant impact on childbirth, this does not mean that this study denies the effectiveness of various policies to promote childbirth given that child rearing and education costs account for a very little. And the focus of this study lies in the fact that this study tried an exploratory attempt to combine Panel Study of Korean Children (PSKC) and Korea Longitudinal Study of Women and Families (KLoWF), using the method of kernel matching. The author hopes that there will be more adundant stdies using the same or similar statistical methods.