Every year in Spain more people die than are born. With 1.19 children per woman, the birth rate is the lowest in 90 years, second only to Italy in Europe. The political parties are picking up the debate and even in the last campaign they spoke of introducing incentives in their electoral programs to counteract this demographic decline, caused, among other things, by the rise in the cost of living, access to housing and inheritance cultural aspects that women still carry in society.
But what would happen if households suddenly received four or five years of their salary as a birth subsidy? Would they start making children when they had no financial restraints to start a family? A recent investigation maintains that no. In a work titled Fortunate families? The effects of wealth on marriage and fertility published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a group of academics has studied how the birth rate varies once the household has extra money.
To do this, they have taken a group of lottery winners in Sweden as a reference to see if their family situation would change after a decade. The impact of this figure (around 90,000 euros) has only meant an increase of 0.03 points in the birth rate: by having extra economic resources it does not seem that paternity and maternity are an automatic consequence.
In fact, previous studies have already verified how the famous baby check of 2,500 euros during the period of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero barely had a short-term and insignificant impact on the birth rate (and it was aid conditioned on procreation).
Anastasia Terskaya, professor in the Department of Economics of the UB and one of the authors of the paper, in light of the results suggests that "it would be more effective to provide other types of social assistance, such as facilitating access to nurseries, because one of the problems of the low birth rate is the cost, particularly for women, of the loss of competitiveness in the labor market. Likewise, with a baby check, the household may prefer to allocate this amount of money to other types of expenses, given the opportunity to do so”.
Instead, this unexpected lottery payoff had a much more significant impact in terms of relationships and the risks of divorce. In singles, it was detected that the possibility of contracting marriage for men increased over time, as if the man gained attractiveness in the “marriage market” –according to the famous expression of the Nobel laureate Gary Becker– by having more status. As for married couples, the effects were also different depending on the gender of the prize winner.
In the short term, the woman had renewed reasons to leave her husband (the divorce rate was almost doubling), as if the new economic situation gave her the opportunity to start over. “One of the hypotheses is that the extra money speeds things up and precipitates an already deteriorating relationship,” says Terskaya. On the other hand, the economic cushion that occurred in married men translated into greater marital stability in the long term. "In fact, a male lottery win increases by 30% the odds that single men will marry in the five years after the win, while married men's odds of divorce are reduced by 40%." says the study.
“Generally speaking, the lower the rents, the greater the impact. And we must bear in mind that Spain is different from Sweden, as it has lower wages and a smaller welfare state, so it is possible that the phenomena are accentuated here”, concludes this academic.
Moral: economic policy can have different effects than its intentions. Assigning extra income to young people in order to become independent or start a family runs the risk of causing marriages to break up without the birth of more children. A legion of divorcees, in an increasingly aging country.
