Trendspotting: Italy’s Baby Bonuses Go Local

NewsWire: 6/16/22

• Italian businesses are taking baby-boost measures into their own hands. To attract workers, local companies are banding together to fund child care and build schools. (Reuters)
  
• NH: At 1.25 in 2021, Italy’s birthrate is one of the lowest in the world. The government has long offered so many different baby bonuses that it recently scrapped them in favor of a streamlined “universal single allowance” available to all families that are expecting or have dependent children. The change was to ensure that the funds reach as many families as possible.
• For some small towns that are rapidly losing young people, such assistance can’t come fast enough. So they’re banding together to offer their own baby bonuses. In the town of Cartigliano, for example (population: 3,800), 40 businesses teamed up to raise €48K that was spent on local families’ school fees and child care costs. In the nearby town of Zane (population: 6,500), 10 firms have teamed up for a similar initiative dubbed “Welcome Stork.”
• It’s not just small businesses that are participating. The Trieste-based company Fincantieri, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, just finished work on the first of several nursery schools it is building in the towns that it operates.
• It will take years, if not decades, for government policies to influence Italy’s overall birthrate. But for individual localities, extra support for young families can affect population size right away by attracting in-migration and deterring out-migration. Just a handful of newcomers can mean the difference between keeping businesses or schools open or not, so it's no wonder town leaders are trying to make living there seem more attractive.
• Even within an affluent economy, the demographic outlook of a backwater community can seem as dire as the outlook for Armenia or Latvia. In other NWs, we have seen how towns in rural Japan (see "Due to Depopulation, Nearly Half of Cities in Japan Are Disappearing") and Spain (see "Spain's Abandoned Rural Towns") are effectively competing with large cities--and with each other--for residents. 
• And these incentives are working. Since the local baby-bonus program was launched, enrollment at Cartigliano’s lone nursery school has already gone up from 24 to 34 students in just a year--a 42% increase.