Abstract:
Purpose/Significance Implementing a fertility policy consistent with national conditions is an important way to solve China’s population problems and achieve sustainable development. Improving the fertility policy system is the only way to promote long-term balanced population development. Existing studies focus on the causes of change, practical dilemmas and institutional construction of fertility policies. Design/Methodology This article collects the fertility policies of 31 provincial governments during the three-child policy period, uses the thematic model LDA algorithm to process more than 1.02 million words of policy texts, empirically analyses the high-frequency words and thematic intensity of the overall and regional policy texts, and explores the focus and shortcomings of provincial fertility policies in the context of the three-child policy through policy text clustering analysis. Conclusions/Findings The study shows that provincial fertility policies are generally uneven in their thematic structure and single-issue subjects, with an overall focus on protection-oriented policies and a lack of encouragement-oriented and service-oriented policies. Due to regional specificities, there are specific distributional differences in maternity support policies between regions with different levels of population and economic development. Based on this, suggestions for policy improvement are made from three perspectives: policy structure, policy subjects and policy innovation.