Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PREGNANCYBENEFIT (Policy Evaluation of a Pregnancy Benefit as a Novel Form of Family Policy in the EU)
Período documentado: 2022-06-15 hasta 2024-12-14
All EU Member States are struggling with the demographic impacts of population ageing and reduced fertility. Several regions experience depopulation, which not only threatens the sustainability of pension systems, but it also creates financial and social challenges, among other things. Different European countries use different types of family policies through which they try to improve their demographic situation and to motivate families to have (more) children. Yet, present policies seem to work only partly. This project conducts interdisciplinary research involving economics, demography, and public policy. The aim is to understand whether a brand-new type of family policy – a pregnancy benefit – could be an effective policy tool in changing the fertility behaviour in Europe. The pregnancy benefit is very different from traditional family policies because it gives financial support to expecting mothers during 6-7 months of their pregnancy, long before the child is born. Usually, governments start to pay financial support to families when the baby is born or just a few weeks before that. The ultimate goal of this research project is to measure whether the pregnancy benefit could be one of the tools that would be able to increase fertility of women in Europe. The second goal is to examine whether health of newly born babies could improve when their mothers receive the pregnancy benefit. Taken together, this research project will assess whether taxpayer money spent on this brand-new family policy measure have any positive impacts either on fertility or on babies’ health. The question is whether public money is well spent on this specific policy measure or whether it might be used more effectively elsewhere. In other words, we want to find family policies that achieve long-term financial sustainability and good cost–outcome ratios.
In order to meet the goals of the research project, researchers assembled data on births, abortions, health of newborn babies, and on payments of the pregnancy benefit. These data are administrative, which means that the state collects them for its own purposes. Under certain conditions, these data can be used also for research purposes. Once the databases were assembled, state-of-the-art statistical models were estimated using the data. These models relied on paying careful attention to the way how the pregnancy benefit policy was implemented. One set of models focused on fertility, meaning that births were the main outcome of interest. Another set of models focused on abortions but this part of the analysis had to be abandoned. The reason was the COVID-19 pandemic, which culminated exactly in the moment when the effect of the pregnancy benefit on abortions should be visible in the data. Thus, it was not possible to distinguish between the effect of the pregnancy benefit and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on abortions. Lastly, a third set of models focused on child health at birth. The indicator that has proven important for lifelong wellbeing of people is birthweight. Therefore, low birthweight was chosen as the main indicator for this part of the analysis.
The main results of the project have shown that the pregnancy benefit increased fertility in Slovakia but only for a very short period of time – for approximately 3 months. Importantly, the increase was very pronounced in low-income women who were eligible for the benefit and there was no effect on fertility among high-income women. At the same time, a second set of analyses has shown that this new type of family policy also improved the health of newborn babies – they faced a lower risk to be born with low birthweight.