Falling birth rates are freaking countries out and spawning dubious fixes like tax breaks, cheaper cars, and free surgery

• Countries are exploring innovative strategies to combat declining birth rates.
• Cash incentives, medals, and even car subsidies are among the measures being adopted.
• But experts say that, at present, no country seems to have found a workable solution.

As fertility rates decline across much of the world, countries are exploring innovative strategies to encourage women to have more babies.

Several demography experts told BI that these can involve lump sums of money, gold medals, and even tax breaks.

But none 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-time payments, and the "Baby Bonus Scheme" continues to provide cash incentives for Singaporean couples having children.

South Korea, which has the world's lowest fertility rate, runs an allowance system that gives parents with a newborn $750 a month until their baby turns one year old.

According to Bloomberg, the country is even considering a proposal to pay families about $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 caution that financial incentives alone are not a long-term solution.

Sarah Harper, a professor of gerontology and the director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, told BI that cash incentives encourage a "mini-baby boom, followed by a baby crash."

She added: "Those women who would have spread their childbearing across several years all go at the same time to get the cash bonus, and then there is a lull in childbearing."

Gold medals, tax breaks, and car subsidies

Other financial incentives include Kazakhstan's prize system for mothers with many children, inspired by the "Mother Heroine" honorary title from the Soviet era.

BBC WorkLife reported that mothers in the country receive silver medals for six children, gold metals for seven or more, and a financial allowance 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 10 or more children.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has also focused on boosting the fertility rate with financial perks.

Women in Hungary who become mothers under 30 or have four or more children receive a lifelong exemption from paying personal income tax.

Meanwhile, Hungarian families with three or more children receive subsidies for purchasing seven-seater cars, according to AP, and parents get loan 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 is uncertain, and might only lead to "modest" gains.

"For example, if a government transferred new parents about 5% of the costs of raising a child, we could expect a roughly 5% bump in fertility," he said.

Generous leave and flexible working conditions

Financial incentives often have an underlying assumption that the cost of parenting 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" pushes people to have fewer children.

In Singapore, these factors include people spending longer in education, changes to traditional family dynamics, and the conflict between building a family and a career, she said.

In 2023, Singapore attempted to address some underlying factors by doubling paid paternity leave to four weeks and increasing unpaid infant care leave from six to 12 days annually for a child's first two years.

Scandinavian countries have gone even further.

Norway provides 49 weeks of parental leave with full pay, Finland offers seven months to each parent, and Sweden provides 240 days per parent of leave.

However, 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 don't end up having more kids; instead, they use generous leave provisions like paid time off and universal childcare to space out having fewer children, to benefit more.

Subsidized fertility treatments and vasectomy reversals

Cohen noted that other strategies to increase fertility rates include countries like Israel offering free or heavily subsidized IVF.

According to the American Economic Association, this may have also had an unintended consequence — leading Jewish-Israeli women to delay getting married and having kids.

Hungary also offers free IVF as part of its pronatalist policies, and Singapore and Japan offer significant subsidies.

However, according to a 2020 essay by Tan, the Japanese example shows that reproductive technologies are not a "panacea" for low fertility rates.

Japan has the world's highest percentage of babies born through IVF, yet it still has one of the lowest fertility rates, she noted.

South Korea also covers the costs of a variety of reproductive technology treatments, such as egg freezing.

However, more recently, Seoul's government made headlines with a proposal offering up to $730 each to 100 people to reverse their vasectomies or untie their tubes.

No magic bullet

Experts agree that there is no easy solution to the fertility crisis.

"No government has discovered a policy that produces sustained bumps in fertility," MacNamara told BI, adding: "Plenty of bright people in wealthy countries have spent decades trying to figure this out without evident success."

He said that young people increasingly see small families as the norm, which is a "really tough cycle to break."

Even if a "magic formula" were to be discovered, he added, it would need to be implemented carefully to avoid then promoting unsustainable population growth.

"Rapid growth would make it harder to scale back our present overconsumption of resources, including fossil fuels," he said.