 Services for Child Care Support as Social Infrastructure: Impact on Birthrate and Migration of Children and Review of Best PracticesKatsuyoshi Nakazawa,
Shumpei Yaoita and
Akira Yokoyama
Public Policy Review, 2016, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-22 Abstract: A family fs function of taking care of its members by itself has weakened due to the family size becoming smaller and women becoming more active in working outside the home. Moreover, various issues such as the increase in the number of children waiting to be admitted to nursery schools and the decline in the birthrate are being pointed out, especially in urban areas. In view of such situation, this paper focuses on the childcare support programs offered by local governments (municipalities) as social infrastructure for childcare support, and evaluates the effects of these programs quantitatively. The paper also aims to identify and study problems with these programs, which have been clarified through an interview survey. The first part of the paper describes the quantitative evaluation regarding whether or not the local government fs socioeconomic characteristics and their childcare support programs successfully create an environment that encourages people to have children, from two perspectives, i.e. birthrate and migration of children. The evaluation results show that the increased availability of nursery schools induces the migration of people who have children, and that it is important to increase the number of nursery schools in the Tokyo metropolitan area in particular. The second part of the paper discusses the developments and problems within the municipal childcare support programs, which have been made clear through interviews with government-designated cities in the Tokyo metropolitan area. To address the serious shortage of nursery schools, these cities have increased the quantity of childcare services. However, as Japan as a whole has entered the phase of population decrease, the decline in the number of children is unavoidable even in the urban areas, and thus building more nursery schools could result in increasing a negative legacy in the future. Municipalities that implement best practices increase not only tangible facilities such as nursery school buildings but also intangible services in order to make effective use of their resources. Such expansion of intangible infrastructure improves the efficiency in supplying childcare services and supplements the shortage of nursing schools through adjustment or by reducing the mismatch between the supply and demand of nursing schools, thereby making a great contribution to solving the issue of children on waiting lists. These best practices suggest that when municipalities decide on and implement policies for strategic infrastructure development, they should consider how to combine and coordinate tangible and intangible infrastructure resources so that these resources complement each other, and how to ultimately improve the gquantity h and gquality h of childcare services. Keywords: Child care support programs; children on waiting-lists; birthrate; migration of children; mismatch between supply and demand of childcare services; concierge services for people who have children; asymmetric information (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mof:journl:ppr012_01a Access Statistics for this article More articles in Public Policy Review from Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Finance Japan Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.