作者:

黃勢璋 ; 林妏蓁 ; 陳國樑

英文關鍵字:

total fertility rate;maternity allowance;Panel regression model;endogeneity problem


公開日期:

2013/12


類型:

學術期刊論文

期刊及卷期:

Social Policy & Social Work, 第17卷, 第2期, 第259-297頁


摘要:


The decreasing total fertility rate has been a major public concern in Taiwan. Except the ”5-year-old Children Education Subsidy” (starting from 2011) and the ”Special Deduction for Preschool Children” (starting from 2012), the central government has failed to provide a complete and effective measure to boost the dropping birth numbers. On the other hand, local governments, however, promote child births with policies of a wider variety. Among them, the most popular and welcome policy is to distribute cash maternity allowance to child births in the jurisdictional area. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of using one-time-allowance to promote birth rate has never been seriously studied. With data from 23 jurisdictional area of Taiwan in the period from 1998 to 2010, panel regressions are used to investigate the relationship between total fertility rate and the distribution of cash maternity allowance by local governments. In order to resolve the potential endogeneity problem in the regressions, local government revenue is used as an instrument. The regression results suggest that there is positive correlation between total fertility rate and the amount of cash maternity allowance, but the effect is small. For women who want to have children in the first place, each NT$1,000 cash allowance raises total fertility rate by 0.0057.