The ageing of populations across most OECD countries, driven by a combination of increasing longevity and falling birth rates, has brought with it a number of challenging issues for social scientists and policy-makers to grapple with. The challenges raised by increasing longevity affordability of pensions, extending working lives, increasing saving are at the forefront of current research and policy debate in the UK, but there has, so far, been relatively less focus on birth rates. While the birth rate in the UK has not fallen as far as in some other European countries, it may only be a matter of time before the UK government follows these other countries in giving consideration to explicitly pro-natalist policies in the face of population ageing.

This project asks whether there is evidence from the UK that the government can influence fertility decisions and it proposes using a number of existing data sets to look at whether recent changes to child benefit payments have had an effect on fertility. While there is a fairly extensive US literature on the fertility-effect of welfare (see Hoynes, 1997) and personal tax exemptions (see Whittington, 1992 and Whittington et al, 1990) and a number of studies in other countries (see, for example, Milligan, 2002, for Canada, Walker, 1995, for Sweden), this issue has been relatively under-researched in the UK (Ermisch, 1988 and Francesconi and van de Klaauw, 2004, are notable exceptions). New Labours reforms to the child benefit system, which substantially increased the generosity of benefits for children, and did so differentially for different group of the population, provide an ideal opportunity to look at this issue again while the stated objective of the reforms was to reduce financial poverty among parents (ie child poverty), they also changed the financial incentives for different families to have children.

This project is part of the ESRC-funded programme, Understanding Population Trends and Processes (UPTAP). The aims of this initiative are: to build capacity in secondary data analysis; to promote the use of large-scale social science data sets, both qualitative and quantitative; and to improve our understanding of demographic trends and processes which affect society and the population.