IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eti/rdpsjp/23030.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Building for Babies: Impacts of childcare expansion on fertility rates and marriage (Japanese)

Author

Listed:
  • UNAYAMA Takashi

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of the development of daycare centers on fertility. Since the 2000s, daycare centers have been rapidly developed as a measure to cope with the declining birthrate. The capacity of daycare centers, which remained at around 2 million children until the early 2000s, expanded to about 3 million by 2020. The increased availability of daycare centers will make it easier for women to continue working after childbirth, and more women will choose to marry and have children. However, the effects of this rapid development of daycare centers in recent years have yet to be analyzed. This is because the decision to give birth is a life-course choice that is made over the course of a woman's lifetime, and it is not possible to observe whether a change in behavior has occurred until after a woman has completed her lifetime. This paper analyzed the decision to "marry" as a proxy variable for life course choices related to birth and quantified the effect of daycare center development. Using census data by prefecture and year of birth, the results indicate that the development of daycare centers since 2005 has had the effect of lowering the lifetime unmarried rate by approximately 5.5 percentage points and raising the total fertility rate by 0.1.

Suggested Citation

  • UNAYAMA Takashi, 2023. "Building for Babies: Impacts of childcare expansion on fertility rates and marriage (Japanese)," Discussion Papers (Japanese) 23030, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
    • Handle: RePEc:eti:rdpsjp:23030
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/23j030.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eti:rdpsjp:23030. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: TANIMOTO, Toko (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rietijp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.