Incentives for Small Families: Concepts and Issues
分析了针对客户的计划生育激励政策的收益与成本，讨论了两种理论基础，并提出了评估框架，对政策制定者和经济学家有参考价值。
This paper examines the benefits and costs of client-targeted family planning incentives-public policies providing specified rewards or penalties for specified fertility-related behavior. Two rationales for incentives are discussed: first, where mar-kets for contraceptives or contraceptive information fail, incentives can increase fami-lies ' welfare by reducing barriers to the use of contraception; and, second, where childbearing imposes external costs not borne by parents, incentives can align private and social costs, improving social welfare. These distinct rationales require distinct types of incentives. Incentive costs include economic costs of program administration; the fiscal (but not economic) cost of the incentive payments; welfare losses incurred if ill-informed or myopic individuals make choices they later regret. Little has been done to assess the costs and benefits of existing or proposed incentive schemes. A framework for doing so is presented. Preliminary evidence from an experiment in the state of Tamil Nadu in India suggests that incentives for short-term trial of contraceptives or for acquiring information may offer substantial benefits at low cost. The use of incentives to encourage small family size has evoked strong emo-