I don't believe monetary incentives are a good way to raise birth rates. In the end a child is massively expensive, and no government can afford to compensate parents completely.
Child care is partly such a monetary incentive (being subsidize and/or enabling parents to earn more), but women will still lose out greatly by giving birth. From what I know of Japanese culture, all these factors must be even worse than in the West...
> I don't believe monetary incentives are a good way to raise birth rates. In the end a child is massively expensive, and no government can afford to compensate parents completely.
Transfer payments don't consume resources, they only reallocate them. If you enact a larger child tax deduction, people with children will pay lower taxes and people without children will pay correspondingly more. The result will be more consumption of childcare and childhood education and less consumption of tourism and luxury cars, but that doesn't harm the local economy -- if anything it helps it, because the things children need tend to be locally produced, rather than your citizens spending money they earned locally to vacation in the Caribbean.
The argument you would have to make is on the other side, that the economy can't afford people to spend time rearing children that they could have spent working. But at a world average level that can't possibly have been true or humans would already be extinct, and economies have much more surplus now than they had in the past. And the cost is inherently short-term, because the net work done by the average human is more than the cost of raising them, so in the long term you get much more from having a working adult than it costs to raise the child.
You also don't have to provide enough in tax incentives to cover the entire cost of the child, only enough to push enough potential parents at the margin over the threshold to raise the fertility rate to the population replacement rate. This may still be a significant amount, but nowhere near the entire cost -- and you only have to offer it during the years when the child is in the care of the parents, not for the parents' entire working life, much less the child's, by which point you're already making dividends -- the now-adult child is working and paying taxes that more than pay for the next generation.
They try very hard to ensure that mothers can’t get good jobs, thus obligating them to stay home and make more babies. Surprisingly, it hasn’t worked very well.
Source: lives here. Most of the 30 and above working mothers I’ve encountered in my time are part time workers without benefits.
Not free as far as I know, there is a points system though (have a 10 month old, loving in Japan with Japanese wife), that worries my wife a lot.
I don't know all the details but she is concerned we won't be able to get our son into a close enough child care to be able to return to work.
It's not a massive problem for us, as we can survive on one pay, but it's still a big worry.
As for support for young children, well the cost to have our son was quite high(compared to Australia - and this is purely subjective mind you, didn't really research it, just asked family members).
If anyone has any specific questions I can ask my wife and reply tomorrow (10pm here).
