Letting people work from home would be the most effective and cheapest way to help reverse falling birth rates, a new report has said.

In many countries across the globe, birth rates have fallen well below the 2.1 replacement rate required for a stable population. Ireland’s is 1.5 and is projected to fall to 1.3 by 2037.

A working paper by economists at King’s College London and Stanford found that in the US, remote work led to 291,000 more births a year, based on figures from 2024. It accounted for 8.1pc of all births that year.

The study found that when both partners worked from home, women’s fertility rate rose by around 0.5 children.

The economists said, in the US,  this one change had a bigger impact on birth rates than government spending on early childhood care and education.

Prof Cevat Aksoy, of King’s, said the UK and other countries experiencing sinking birth rates should take lessons from the study’s observations.