National Efforts To Reverse Declining Populations
Further information: Natalistic politicsRussian President Vladimir Putin directed Parliament to adopt a 10-year program to stop the sharp decline in Russia's population, principally by offering financial incentives and subsidies to encourage women to have children. Australia currently offers a $5,000 bonus for every baby plus additional fortnightly payments, a free immunisation scheme and recently proposed to pay all child care costs for women who want to work. Many European countries, including France, Italy, Germany and Poland, have offered some combination of bonuses and monthly payments to families. Some Japanese localities, facing significant population loss, are offering economic incentives. Yamatsuri, a town of 7,000 just north of Tokyo, offers parents $4,600 for the birth of a child and $460 a year for 10 years. The Republic of Singapore has similar plans: $3,000 for the first child, $9,000 in cash and savings for the second; and up to $18,000 each for the third and fourth. The effectiveness of these policies is currently the subject of debate.
Paid maternity and paternity leave policies can also be used as an incentive. Sweden built up an extensive welfare state from the 1930s and onward, partly as a consequence of the debate following Crisis in the Population Question, published in 1934. Today, Sweden has generous parental leave where parents are entitled to share 16 months paid leave per child, the cost divided between both employer and State.
Read more about this topic: Population Decline
Famous quotes containing the words national, efforts, reverse, declining and/or populations:
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“Those great efforts of intellect, upon which the mind sometimes touches, are such that it cannot maintain itself there. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, forever, but merely for an instant.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“Now listen, buddy, there are a few corny ideas you got to get out of your head if you’re going to fly an airplane. Most things are just the reverse from what people think. The higher you are the safer you are. The Earth down there, that, that’s your enemy because once you hit that, boy, you splatter.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)
“Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth’s mayor addressed them
First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)