Recent headlines highlighting the birth of the world’s seven billionth person cannot obscure the fact that much of the developed world is in fact heading for demographic collapse.
In a recent report, entitled the Sustainable Demographic Dividend, Phillip Longman and a number of other scholars track the patterns of demographic decline globally and their causes. One big cause is, of course, the decline of the family and of family-friendly policies.
The authors propose 10 key policies which might reverse this decline and grow the economy.
The ten are: promote family enterprise; increase income security for young couples; ease the tension between higher education and family formation; build livable, family-friendly communities; honour work-family ideals for all women; support marriage and responsible parenthood; promote thrift; adjust the financing of the welfare state to meet the needs of an aging society; clean up the culture; respect the role of religion as a pro-natal force.
Those familiar with the work of The Iona Institute will recognise some of those recommendations, e.g. promote marriage, support the work-family ideals of all women. Certain other will not be so familiar but are definitely worth examining. For example, there is the suggestion re small family-run businesses. The authors point out that the last 25 years many family-run businesses have been destroyed or taken over by huge corporations. Think of what the big supermarket chains have done to small family groceries. Today, they write, “there is almost no check on the growth of giant retailers, agribusinesses, and industrial concerns”.
Longman et all believe that it would be possible to moderate the trend towards monopolisation “and thereby carve out more space for family enterprise and entrepreneurship, which will in turn help to rebuild the economic foundation of the family”.
They write: “A good start would be to offer payroll tax breaks to small businesses and to more rigorously enforce existing anti-monopoly laws.”
They also urge governments to improve income security for young couples. While they accept that economic trends such as corporate downsizing, globalisation and outsourcing are unlikely to go away they argue that “it is essential that measures of efficiency not be so narrowly defined that they discount the vital role that secure, functioning families play in sustaining economic progress”.
They suggest that governments should “ensure access to affordable health care and lifetime learning to keep job skills from becoming obsolete” as a means to “soften the blows young adults face from income and employment instability associated with globalisation”.
They also urge governments to do more to ensure that women have more choice as regards staying at home to look after their children or going out to work.
Presently, the Irish Government’s tax individualisation policy and policies pursued in countries such as Sweden incentivise women to enter paid employment, and discourage them from staying at home to care for their children.
Instead, they urge politicians to follow Finland’s homecare allowance policy.
This policy provides parents who do not use public childcare with a stipend that they can use for their own family budget-or to pay a grandparent, neighbor, friend, or nanny to care for their children.
In Finland, the allowance is less expensive than the cost of public childcare and is linked to increases in fertility.
All 10 proposals can be found, in detail, here [1]:
It’s a thought-provoking list, and well worth a read.