There was some interesting food for thought in today’s WSJ about the relationship between affordable child care and a country’s fertility rate.
Government money spent on child care to help families manage work-life balance helps raise fertility rates more than money given directly to families to subsidize births, according to a report released today by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Except for the U.S., most industrialized countries have spent a relatively large share of gross domestic product on family-related polices, such as child care, subsidized maternity or paternity leaves or tax breaks for families, reports Sebastian Moffett in today’s WSJ. But the way the money is spent varies sharply between countries depending on their different aims, according to the OECD. Some policies are directly aimed at boosting the birth rate, such as subsidizing women to take time off from work to raise young children. Other policies have tried to help women return quickly to the workforce, by providing facilities such as child care.
The OECD found that the policies that seemed to have the greatest effect on birth rates are the ones aimed at helping women combine career and family, rather than those trying directly to boost the birth rate…