Most visitors to Stockholm and other Scandinavian cities and towns marvel not just at the cities themselves but at the residents and their lives as well. They see a constant procession of moms and dads pushing strollers, taking their children to the playground, and meeting other parents for coffee – all during working hours. Nordic citizens can engage in such pursuits because new parents in Scandinavia have the right to lots of paid time. In Sweden, the parents of every newborn (or newly adopted child) are legally entitled to 480 days of leave. Ninety of those days are paid at a standard rate, and the remaining 390 days are based on the parents’ ordinary income. There’s also a 1,250 krona (about $121) monthly government subsidy per child; the amount increases from the second child.
Such perks are unimaginable to parents in the United States. But the policies of countries like Sweden aren’t simply the result of the generous northern European social welfare model. They’re also a pragmatic way of ensuring that birth rates remain at sustainable levels. And Europe needs more of such policies. Around the continent, fertility rates are now dropping not just in the usual places – like Italy and Spain – but also in countries such as Poland and Lithuania. Europe as a whole is shrinking at a precipitous rate. In 2022, only 3.88 million babies were born in the European Union – just over half as many as in 1964, when the countries that today form the EU saw 6.4 million births. The same decline has been taking place in the United Kingdom, where just over 605,000 babies were born in 2022, compared with just over 875,000 in 1964. Unless European countries manage to increase their young populations, the continent faces a future in which there are not enough people to do the work that needs to be done, even if artificial intelligence succeeds in taking over some duties. It will also be a continent where there are not enough people to look after the older population (imagine senior citizens attended to by robots) and not enough people to fund the government through their taxes. And it will be a continent that faces rapidly increasing national security threats, yet its countries have nowhere near enough people to serve in their armed forces.
Baby bust
Every EU member state is required to offer all new mothers a minimum of 14 weeks of paid leave, while new dads get a minimum of two weeks. But a few European nations stand out for their generosity. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have given their citizens generous parental benefits for decades now. And countries like Bulgaria and Ireland have more recently adopted similar policies. As these states have shown, supporting new parents is not just a matter of ideology. It’s a way of encouraging people to have children and thus to maintain a sustainable national birth rate.
Demographers tell us that government incentives don’t result in more births. “When you work with politicians, you always see the same things. ‘Oh yes, we should have one month’s more paternity leave!’ All the scholars are like: you should, but it won’t change anything,” the Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch told the Financial Times earlier this year. Indeed, human beings are not mechanistic entities that will respond predictably if condition A exists and the government adds B. Not even Hungary, where the government of President Viktor Orbán has made family formation a top priority, has found a winning formula. Even though couples receive generous grants and loans upon having children, the birth rate is still only 1.36 per woman. If countries want to increase their birth rates, they need to change their cultural attitudes toward families. Take the United States as an example: Despite limited government incentives – including, infamously, no legal right to paid leave for parents of newborns – the United States has a birth rate of more than 1.8 per woman. That’s because the country has a culture where having children is considered natural and positive. Other countries that lack such cultures can’t assume that healthy birth rates will simply materialize if they change their policies. Such countries need something more difficult too: a change in their cultures.
To understand the role of culture, consider Japan, where despite increasingly urgent government incentives such as a 15,000-yen monthly payment per child, equal to about $103, birth rates have been declining for the past 15 years. In 2022, the Japanese birth rate dropped to 1.26 per woman. If the current trajectory continues, the population of the world’s third-largest economy will fall by about 30%, to 87 million, by 2070. By then, four out of every 10 people in Japan will be at least 65 years old. That’s a devastating future for Japan’s labor market, not to mention the country’s security, especially now that China is becoming more belligerent. Without enough young people to defend the country and work in its factories, tech firms, hospitals, waterworks, power plants, railways, and much else, Japan will grind to a halt. Though the government has been rolling out incentives for years, they’ve not had the desired effect – perhaps because, again, humans don’t respond to incentives in a Pavlovian manner, especially not in areas as fundamental as procreation. Instead, Japanese people – like those in every advanced economy – would be more likely to respond to a culture where having children is enjoyable and appreciated.
Read the rest of this piece at The Bush Center.
Elisabeth Braw is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a columnist for Foreign Policy and Politico Europe.
Photo: Thomas Hawk via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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