A Study of Financial Support Plan in Response to Low Fertility: Low Fertility Special Account

Abstract

The Plan for Ageing Society and Population includes many of ministerial-level projects, and all budgets for these projects are defined as “related budgets.” The policies on low fertility, despite its large-scale budget, are often regarded to have been less effective than intended. Experts believe that the policies promoted so far were insufficient to solve the fundamental cause of low fertility. In order for policies on low fertility to be more effective, they need to be implemented promoted from an integrated and macroscopic perspective based on stable financial resources. In other words, there is a need for a mechanism of financial support that prioritizes policies on low fertility, allowing the government to actively invest budgets and implement the policies in a comprehensive way. This study aims to review the conditions and possibility of introducing the special account for low fertility based on the analysis of the budget structure of the low fertility policy and the case of domestic special account and overseas budget operation. Our analysis of budgets on low-fertility related policies found that although there was a salient increase in spending on policies for the area of child care, no active attempts were made to expand spending on policies in other areas. In particular, the expansion of policies on the areas—marriage, pregnancy, childbirth and work and family balance—was found to be less that expected. In addition, the current policy composition includes a number of policies with low relevance, and the budget for major policies is insufficient, and the current state of financial allocation by sector is not balanced. It was found that there is a need to define policies for responding to low fertility and to select a target areas accordingly, and that there is a great need to resolve the imbalance between areas and to promote the policies in an integrated manner. To this end, the introduction of a special account for low birthrates can be considered. The low fertility special account is expected to be able to operate the integrated financial resources targeting the main policy areas or introduce it to a single project. In the former case, the expected effect of the special accounts can be maxmized, but the practical difficulties are great, whereas the latter case has the advantage of stably securing financial resources for the policy, although the expected effect on the promotion of the integration of related policies is low.