Pronatalist policies needed to boost fertility rate

The Economist published an article on May 23, titled "Why paying women to have more babies won't work", questioning the effectiveness of pronatalist policies in increasing total fertility rates. The article's arguments are misleading and its conclusion is absurd.

The article argues that pronatalist policies are ineffective in case of professional women, citing evidence that university-educated women only delay childbearing slightly, and have roughly the same number of children as their peers did a generation ago. This argument is unfounded.

To determine whether a policy is effective or not, one needs to compare the fertility status of women who benefited from the policy with those who did not. In the absence of micro-level data, one may compare fertility rates of different countries giving different levels of subsidies. In this regard, data from Europe show a 1 percent increase in family welfare expenditure relative to GDP corresponds to roughly a 0.1 increase in fertility rates.