In the past decades many governments had different plans to curb birth rates, the growing population in the world had seemed daunting back then. Nowadays the situation is much different, the governments around the world are setting different incentives for women to have more children. The Chinese government, which for a long time had stuck to one child per family policy, is now introducing financial packages for women to have more children. Among developed countries only Israel has enough fertility rate among its women to preserve its young population. Elon musk the owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX went so far to say that diminishing birth rates would end civilization!
In many developed countries, the government’s stimulus for having more childs include maternity leaves, tax benefits, and child care. However one important aspect of these programs is that these incentives tend to affect professional mothers mostly. That is because of prior experiments which showed that simple cash transfers only incentivise poor families to have more children, and the kids which are born in such families are more prone to be involved into social anomalies when they grow up. Thus new incentives are designed in a way that mostly benefit more wealthy parents with a proper job.
Different studies show that these incentives are working but the effect is very small and marginal. That is because it is not possible to exclude those parents that would have had babies even without any of these policies. For example, each extra baby who had been borned between 2016 to 2019 as a result of the Polish Child 500+ policy, had cost the country more than one million dollars. Similar estimates show that the cost of one extra-born baby in France over past ten years, was over two million dollars.
Source: Economist
