Exactly this. European governments have put various financial incentives in place for having kids, yet they're scratching their heads why they're not working.
At least in Austria, it pretty much doesn't matter how much your household earns, up to a certain level (it's somewhere around €2300/month net if I remember correctly), as long as you have at least 2 kids. The child benefits plus family tax breaks compensate for low income. The benefits are diminished (not just proportionally) at higher income levels, which basically means there's an incentive for poor people to have kids. Having a kid probably won't reduce your standard of living if it comes with a 50% raise or whatever. One parent dropping from full-time to part time will also have little to zero financial impact at that level.
At higher income levels, none of that is true. The jobs tend to be more demanding, working part time is hardly an option, and daytime childcare is expensive. The €100/month/child or so the government give you won't even get close to covering that.
I don't know if the incentives are working among those with lower income - they have more kids, but for all I know they would have more anyway, but the current setup is useless for encouraging reproduction across the board.
I don't know about Austria, but in the Netherlands there's a similar monetary compensation you get for each child; however, AFAIK it's not meant to "encourage" people to have more children. Rather, it's meant to make up for the increased cost of living once your family expands.
(There's a Dutch politician quoted in the article as saying that Dutch women should have more babies... it seemed awfully odd to me. Upon closer investigation, he was talking about cranking up the birth rate from 1.7 to 2.1.)
"Removing discouragement is the same overall as adding encouragement."
It may have the same effect, but it something entirely different. For example, would you argue that legalizing the sale of tobacco or alcohol is the same as encouraging people to smoke or drink?
It's not clear to me that legalization of those drugs would have the same effect as doing something else with the intent to encourage use of them. However, in the case of money, it's a little clearer: the only difference between giving someone extra money when they have another child and replacing money they spend on an extra child is what you say about it.
Now, it's true that what you say about it can have a real effect on choices and outcomes, but we don't really know enough to reliably predict what that effect is in the general case, so for practical purposes, I think we're better off assuming that the effects are negligible.
I think it's pretty safe to say that paying cash for every child falls squarely in the category of "rewarding behaviour you wish to encourage", let alone subsidised housing, tax breaks and paid maternity leave. There are obviously degrees of encouragement or discouragement, but that's beside the point. Which, in case it wasn't clear, was that these measures only have a hope of working with low-income households as the advantage of fixed-size benefits (cash child benefits, paid maternity leave) diminishes proportionately, and the rest (tax breaks, housing) are inversely dependent on income.
At least in Austria, it pretty much doesn't matter how much your household earns, up to a certain level (it's somewhere around €2300/month net if I remember correctly), as long as you have at least 2 kids. The child benefits plus family tax breaks compensate for low income. The benefits are diminished (not just proportionally) at higher income levels, which basically means there's an incentive for poor people to have kids. Having a kid probably won't reduce your standard of living if it comes with a 50% raise or whatever. One parent dropping from full-time to part time will also have little to zero financial impact at that level.
At higher income levels, none of that is true. The jobs tend to be more demanding, working part time is hardly an option, and daytime childcare is expensive. The €100/month/child or so the government give you won't even get close to covering that.
I don't know if the incentives are working among those with lower income - they have more kids, but for all I know they would have more anyway, but the current setup is useless for encouraging reproduction across the board.