Getting to Israel

Does any fertility policy work?

This follows from yesterday’s post

In the Chinese province of Hubei, troupes of local women are paid to walk around banging pots and drums and yelling slogans like ‘Giving birth is an important part of life!’ and ‘The three-child policy is good!’ China now even has beauty pageants for pregnant women and is produces rap videos promoting the joys of childbearing.

The People’s Republic, which once forcibly mandated a one-child policy, is now desperately trying to breed its way out of a fertility-driven economic crisis, a global problem outlined in Paul Morland’s No One Left - but it is hardly alone.

According to The Economist the share of countries with active pro-natalist policies has grown from 20% back in 2005 to 28% in 2019. Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has called the country’s birth rate a ‘top priority’, while French President Emmanuel Macron has promised ‘demographic rearmament.’ This is hardly new, and for historical reasons the French have long been in the vanguard of pro-natalism, so that even in the 1980s socialist president François Mitterrand actively tried to encourage larger families.

Britain is rather unusual in not even facing the problem, and where this issue is discussed at all in the English-speaking world it tends to be on the Right, with a few exceptions such as Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani. New vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance was one of the first American politicians to appreciate the danger of low fertility, which, naturally, journalists used to smear him. Indeed, Vance has even suggested giving parents an additional vote for each child.

In Britain, former Tory MP Miriam Cates has argued that tax and welfare policies should be ‘focused on enabling couples to have the children they want, not stopping them.’ But these are rare exceptions.

In contrast, most European countries now have some form of fertility policy, although Hungary is notable for the lengths it goes to raise its birth rates, including very generous tax benefits to those who have large families. Yet despite the attention it has gathered, from critics and supporters, Hungary’s fertility rate has not risen beyond 1.5 and there doesn’t seem to be any sign that it will reach the magic figure of 2.1.

Whether this can be considered a failure is debatable, since as Morland points out, we don’t have a counterfactual. Twenty years ago, Hungary had the lowest total fertility rate on earth and it is now twice that of South Korea, so it might well have gone down or stayed around 1.25 – but it’s currently little different from that of Slovakia or Romania.

The gloomy reality is that no state pro-natal policy has really succeeded, although for a while Georgia managed to raise its total to 2.1, thanks to a drive aided by the national church (in Europe’s most religious country). South Korea offers free IVF and subsidised housing but has the lowest fertility levels on earth. Canada has generous child benefits but, again, its fertility is in freefall.

While childcare costs are blamed for Britain’s problems, being the third most expensive in the world, Nordic countries with very generous benefits are hardly doing much better.

As Peter Hurst has written, in Norway ‘the average family only spends 8% on childcare and parents also share 49 weeks of parental leave at full pay, but yet their total fertility rate is also below replacement-rate levels and, as recently as 2020, was lower than the UK rate at 1.48 births per woman compared to 1.56 births per woman in the UK.‘

A few years ago Finland was being touted as a model where generous social provision allowed women in the workforce to also have babies, but Finnish fertility has fallen by a third since 2010, and is only slightly higher than Italy.

Economic incentives don’t count for nothing, and Morland cites studies of Norwegian districts where childcare subsidies vary to show that these can increase people’s willingness to have more children. But these seem to make only a marginal difference, as do housing costs, often blamed for plunging family formation. They matter, and they certainly make people’s lives less stressful, but they aren’t anything like a solution.