SYDNEY: China’s one-child policy has created a generation that is less trusting, more risk-averse and perhaps less likely to become entrepreneurs, according to new Autralian research released on Friday.

Published in the journal Science, the study of more than 400 Beijing residents who were born around the time the controversial population policy was first introduced could have implications for China’s economy, researchers say.

“We found that individuals who grew up as single children as a result of China’s one-child policy are significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious,” said University of Melbourne researcher Nisvan Erkal.

China introduced the policy in 1979 to combat population growth and family planning officials in Beijing have defended it in the past, saying China’s population—currently 1.3 billion—would have hit 1.7 billion without it.

The new study, “Little Emperors: Behavioral Impacts of China’s One-Child Policy,” based on research by Erkal, Monash University and Australian National University academics, found the group displayed distinct behavior.

The scholars used a series of “economic games”—in which the 421 subjects born between 1975 and 1983 exchanged or invested small amounts of money, or made other economic decisions—to measure their levels of trust, risk-taking and competitiveness.

In one game, participants born under the One-Child Policy were on average found to be less trusting than those born before, sharing less of an endowment with another player (46.1 percent compared to 50.6 percent).

In addition to the experiments, researchers also conducted personality surveys that they said revealed those born under the policy were also “substantially more pessimistic, less conscientious, and possibly more neurotic.”

“The OCP can be thought of as a natural experiment which enables us to separate out the effect of being an only child from the effect of family background,” they wrote.

Researcher Lisa Cameron from Monash said the effect could have economic implications.

“Our data show that people born under the one-child policy were less likely to be in more risky occupations like self-employment,” she said. “Thus there may be implications for China in terms of a decline in entrepreneurial ability.”