This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 10th,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown. For families that would like to add children or add

more children, a wide variety of policies make those choices more difficult,

expensive, and time consuming. A new paper from the Cato Institute's Vanessa Brown Calder

and Chelsea Follett details some of the changes that could ease burdens on growing

families. I spoke with Calder today. I've heard it sent from a couple of sources

that if the government wanted to birth rates go way up.

In the United States, they're very important to government to have birth rates go way up.

In the United States, they're below replacement.

Globally, they are on the downward trend toward below replacement.

But even massive interventions do not appear to be particularly productive in raising birth rates.

And again, I'm not saying if that's a good policy goal or not, but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of evidence that the government can do much to move birth rates up. Is that right? Right, well I think that that's generally right. I don't think that there's absolutely nothing that would have an influence on birth rates and that's not what we intend to say in the

paper or convey in the paper. We do look at international initiatives to increase

fertility rates and we find that the results are limited or

disappointing overall. Many other countries have tried spending their way out of

fertility decline.

And in 2015, more than 50 countries cited increasing fertility as a national goal.

But however, and despite that, and despite a lot of spending sort of social spending and some direct spending,

trying to increase fertility in no OECD country is the total fertility rate near the replacement rate of 2.1 and that includes

places that have you know more equal gender norms and some of these other things that

may influence fertility rates as well.

We include some estimates in the paper, one notable one which looks at the domestic, the

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