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Countries are exploring innovative strategies to combat declining birth rates.
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Cash incentives, medals and even car subsidies are among the measures being adopted.
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But experts say no country appears to have found a workable solution.
As fertility rates decline in much of the world, countries are exploring innovative strategies to encourage women to have more children.
Several demography experts told Business Insider that this involved large sums of money, gold medals and even tax breaks.
But nothing will be enough to solve the problem alone, they said.
Baby bonuses
Several countries have introduced so-called baby bonuses to combat declining fertility rates.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Singapore offered one-off payments, and the “Baby Bonus Scheme” continues to offer financial incentives to Singaporean couples having children.
South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world, operates a stipend system that provides benefits to parents a newborn $750 a month until their baby turns 1 year old.
According to Bloomberg, the country is even considering a proposal to pay families around $70,000 to have children.
Local Chinese governments, meanwhile, offer one-time subsidies, often worth thousands of dollars, to encourage parents to have two or more children.
However, experts say financial incentives alone are not a long-term solution.
Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, told BI that financial incentives encouraged a “mini-baby boom” followed by a baby crash.
She added: “Those women who would have spread their fertility over several years are all going to receive the cash bonus at the same time, and then there will be a pause in having children.”
Gold medals, tax breaks and car subsidies
Other financial incentives include Kazakhstan’s prize system for mothers with many children, inspired by the Soviet-era honorific “mother heroine.”
BBC WorkLife reported that mothers in the country received silver medals for six children, gold medals for seven or more, and financial compensation for the rest of their lives.
In 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin introduced a similar program, offering a title and a lump sum of about $17,000 to Russian citizens with ten or more children.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has also focused on increasing the fertility rate with financial benefits.
Women in Hungary who become mothers or have four or more children under the age of 30 receive a lifelong exemption from paying personal income tax.
Meanwhile, Hungarian families with three or more children will receive subsidies to purchase seven-seat cars, The Associated Press reported, and parents will receive mortgage deductions on their homes based on the number of children they have.
Trent MacNamara, a Texas A&M professor whose work has focused on fertility rates, told BI that the impact of financial incentives on fertility rates was uncertain and could lead to only modest gains.
“For example, if a government were to transfer 5% of the cost of raising a child to new parents, we could expect an increase in fertility of around 5%,” he said.
Generous leave and flexible employment conditions
Financial incentives often rely on the underlying assumption that the cost of parenthood is the main reason behind declining fertility rates.
However, Poh Lin Tan, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, told BI that “an amalgam of factors” is pushing people to have fewer children.
In Singapore, these factors include people spending more time on education, changes in traditional family dynamics and the conflict between building a family and a career, she said.
In 2023, Singapore sought to address some underlying factors by doubling paid paternity leave to four weeks and increasing unpaid childcare leave from six to 12 days per year for a child’s first two years.
The Scandinavian countries have gone even further.
Norway offers 49 weeks of parental leave with full pay, Finland offers seven months of leave for each parent and Sweden offers 240 days of leave per parent.
But Philip N. Cohen, a family demographer at the University of Maryland, told BI that these policies often have unintended effects.
He said that in some circumstances, parents may end up not having more children; instead, they use generous leave benefits like paid leave and universal child care to spread out having fewer children so they can benefit more from them.
Subsidized fertility treatments and vasectomy reversals
Cohen said other strategies to boost fertility rates include countries like Israel offering free or heavily subsidized in vitro fertilization.
According to the American Economic Association, this may also have had an unintended consequence: It led Jewish Israeli women to delay marriage and childbearing.
Hungary also offers free IVF as part of its pronatalist policy, and Singapore and Japan offer significant subsidies.
However, a 2020 essay by Tan said that the Japanese example showed that reproductive technologies are not a panacea for low fertility rates.
Japan has the world’s highest rate of babies born through IVF, yet one of the lowest fertility rates, she said.
South Korea also covers the costs of various reproductive technology treatments, such as egg freezing.
More recently, the Seoul government made headlines with a proposal to offer $730 per person to 100 people to reverse their vasectomy or disconnect their fallopian tubes.
No miracle cure
Experts agreed that there is no easy solution to the fertility crisis.
“No government has discovered a policy that causes sustained increases in fertility,” MacNamara told BI, adding: “Many smart people in rich countries have been trying to figure this out for decades with no apparent success.”
He said young people are increasingly seeing small families as the norm, which is a “really difficult cycle to break.”
Even if a “magic formula” were discovered, he added, it would have to be carefully implemented to avoid promoting unsustainable population growth.
“Fast growth would make it more difficult to reduce our current overconsumption of resources, including fossil fuels,” he said.
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