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, only surpassed in Europe by Italy. The political parties are picking up the debate and even in the last campaign they talked about introducing incentives in electoral programs to counter the demographic decline, caused, among other things, by the rise in the cost of living, access to 'housing and the cultural heritages that women still drag into society.
But what would happen if households suddenly received four or five years' salary in the form of a birth allowance? Would they start having children so as not to have financial constraints to start a family? A recent research argues that no. In a work entitled 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 when the household has some extra money.
To do this, they took into account a group of lottery winners in Sweden to see if their family situation had changed after a decade. The impact of the figure (around 90,000 euros) has only meant an increase of 0.03 points in the birth rate: when you have extra financial resources, it does not seem that fatherhood and motherhood are an automatic consequence.
In fact, previous studies already found that the famous baby check of 2,500 euros during the period of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero only had a short-term and insignificant impact on the birth rate (and it was aid conditional on the fact that procreate).
Anastasia Terskaya, a professor in the Department of Economics at the UB and one of the authors of the work, seeing the results suggests that "it would be more effective to provide another type of social aid, such as facilitating access to daycare centers, because one of the problems of the low birth rate is the cost that, in particular for women, the loss of competitiveness in the labor market. Likewise, with a baby check it may be that the household prefers to allocate the amount of money to another type of expenditure, since they have the opportunity to do so".
Instead, this lottery windfall had a much more significant impact on marital relationships and divorce risks. In the case of singles, it was detected that the possibility of 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 - due to the fact of having more status For married couples, the effects also differed by the gender of the prize winner.
In the short term, the wife had renewed reasons to leave her husband (the divorce rate almost doubled), as if the new economic situation gave her a chance to start over. "One of the hypotheses is that the extra money accelerates events and causes a deteriorated relationship to be precipitated," says Terskaya. In contrast, the economic cushion in married men translated into greater long-term marital stability. "In fact, a male lottery prize increases the odds of single men getting married by 30% in the five years after the prize, while the odds of married men getting divorced are reduced by 40%," explains the study.
"Generally speaking, the lower the incomes, the greater the impact. And it must be borne in mind that Spain is different from Sweden, as it has lower wages and less welfare state, so it is possible that the phenomena will be accentuated here", concludes the academic.
The lesson to be drawn from this is that economic policy can have different effects in terms of intentions. Allocating extra income to young people to become independent or start a family risks breaking up marriages without more children being born. A legion of divorcees in an increasingly aging country.
