In a bid to boost its disastrously low fertility rate, China has just announced a payment of Rmb3,600 (€438) a year for the first three years of a child’s life.
There is something obscene about pivoting to cash payments for births, given China’s appalling one-child policy, which led to innumerable human rights violations. While technically only enormous fines could be levied on families having an unsanctioned child, in reality, provinces conducted forced abortions, sometimes up to nine months, and forced sterilisations.
This was documented by writer and dissident Ma Jian while researching his novel, The Dark Road. Family planning officials monitored women’s menstrual cycles and ruthlessly punished unauthorised pregnancies. One official had dragged his own cousin to a forced termination at six months.
While few countries have as ghastly a historic record, China is not alone in offering incentives to give birth. Italy instituted a €1,000 newborn baby bonus for every child born or adopted after January 1st, 2025. Right across the world, with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, falling fertility rates are causing alarm.
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Ireland is not immune. Although the island’s population reached seven million recently for the first time since the Famine, the Republic’s total fertility rate in 2024 was 1.5, far below the replacement level of 2.1.
There are numerous theories about why people are no longer having enough babies to replace themselves.
Economic historian Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work on women’s participation in the paid economy and the gender pay gap.
Goldin has a new working paper, Babies and the Macroeconomy, examining demographic decline. She analyses six countries where demographic decline is not as stark: the US, Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden and Britain, and six which are considered among the “lowest low”: South Korea, Greece, Italy, Japan, Portugal and Spain.
The latter countries underwent very rapid economic development after the 1950s, as opposed to steadier and more continuous growth (with some economic shocks) in the first group. She believes that in the second group there was a rapid “transformation from a society that is less well connected, more tradition bound, relatively isolated and rural, and communal rather than individualistic, into a nation that is generally the opposite, with more developed markets, thicker communication networks and denser settlements.”
Where this rapid transformation happened, gender roles did not evolve as quickly, and women were expected to shoulder caring work as well as paid employment outside the home.
[ Why women are having fewer babies, in Ireland and worldwideOpens in new window ]
Goldin suggests that rapid economic growth did not affect men’s gender roles anywhere near as dramatically as women’s. In countries where gender equity is greater, the decline in population has not been as rapid.
Goldin analysed OECD time-use studies, which show that on average, women in Japan and Italy spent about three more hours a day doing household duties than men. In the US, women did around 1.8 extra hours of housework daily, while in Sweden, the gap was just under an hour more.
Goldin suggests that the US provides one of the few examples of a wealthy country increasing the birth rate, albeit temporarily. During the 1950s, the birth rate peaked above 3.5 children per woman, which gave the generation its moniker, Boomers.
She suggests this was accomplished by “glorifying marriage, motherhood, the ‘good wife’ and the home”. In a world where women are having fewer children, she wonders whether a similar rise might be accomplished by “glorifying parenthood, especially fatherhood?” This demands not penalising people who request flexible work arrangements.
Instead, flexible working arrangements, including working from home, are being taken away, causing disquiet among employees.
A report in this newspaper described the dismay of AIB staff when hybrid workers were told recently they’ll need to return to the office three days a week.
While Goldin’s thesis is interesting and persuasive – and I am completely in favour of a cultural shift that respects parenthood – I am not sure it explains everything. For an economic historian, everything will have an economic explanation. But even the countries she lists where the total fertility rate has not fallen as far are still failing to replace themselves.
Iceland has been ranked by the World Economic Forum as the best country for closing the gender gap for the 16th year in a row, but in 2024, Iceland’s fertility rate fell to 1.56, the lowest ever recorded there.
King’s College lecturer Alice Evans says the decline in childbearing stems from three interrelated factors: a steep decline in people forming couples, the rise of personalised online entertainment via our phones, and people being put off by the costs of intensive parenting and time investment in children.
All three of Evans’s factors relate to a rise in expressive individualism, the idea that you create your identity rather than finding it in a community. This echoes Goldin’s point about moving from communities to individualism, but does not foreground gender equity alone as a solution. Instead, it focuses on cultural trends leading to growing isolation.
Having children is an act of faith in the future. Despite the fact that falling fertility rates will radically undermine our capacity to navigate that future, many people’s unwillingness to make that act of faith relates to something deeper than economic factors alone.
