For the last five years, fertility levels in Norway have reached new historical lows every year. The conditions in the Norwegian labor market have been and still are quite good. At the same time, the government offers generous policies when people have children, meaning we must search elsewhere for explanations for the decline in fertility than family policies. According to the uncertainty perspective, people in an uncertain economic situation or people viewing the future as more economically uncertain, may be more hesitant to have children. We argue that future fertility trends must be considered in relation to possible changing preferences where people may give higher priorities to other activities than having children, the role of men’s fertility trajectories and the consequences of a shift in the social inequality in fertility.
For the last five years, fertility levels in Norway have reached new historical lows every year. The conditions in the Norwegian labor market have been and still are quite good. At the same time, the government offers generous policies when people have children, meaning we must search elsewhere for explanations for the decline in fertility than family policies. According to the uncertainty perspective, people in an uncertain economic situation or people viewing the future as more economically uncertain, may be more hesitant to have children. We argue that future fertility trends must be considered in relation to possible changing preferences where people may give higher priorities to other activities than having children, the role of men’s fertility trajectories and the consequences of a shift in the social inequality in fertility.
Germany has been one of the “lowest low fertility countries” for almost fifty years. For several decades, Germany has also been one of the countries worldwide that spend the most on family policy services, measured in terms of gross domestic product (ca. 3%). During the years 2011 to 2021 Germany has been able to record a moderate increase in its birth rate from 1,39 to 1,58. In 2022, however, the birth rate fell again significantly. Against this background, the article addresses two questions: What are the reasons for the moderate recovery of the birth rate in the last years? What role do family policy measures play in this?
Italy has been affected for a long time by a fertility decline. Whilst lower fertility rates were initially more prominent in northern and central regions, the trend has inversed in the past twenty years and currently central and southern regions show the lowest fertility levels. This article observes that main factors behind low fertility are found in structural constraints of the labour market and in underdeveloped social investment policies. The article further describes recent policies to counteract low fertility in Italy. Also due to a prolonged austerity policy implemented from the 1990s due to pressures from the European Union, welfare politics in Italy does not seem to actively pursue a pro-natalist and social investment oriented agenda of social policy reforms.
Japan has been active in the past several years in working to protect the rights and welfare of children. These efforts culminated in the legislation of the Basic Act on the Rights of the Child, whose enactment laid the legal basis for implementing in an integrated way those various child policy programs that until then had been delivered separately. In the process, the Japanese government established the Children and Family Agency, tasked with overall control of the implementation of policies on children, including those aimed at helping to raise the birthrate. The Japanese government has asserted that it should, over the six to seven years to 2030, keeping in mind that these years could be the last chance period to tackle the low-fertility situation, press on with policy measures in ways different from the past. This article examines the Basic Act on the Rights of the Child, the role of the Children and Family Agency, and the Japanese government’s policies on low fertility.
This essay summarizes policy approaches towards raising marriage and fertility rates in Singapore between 2001 and 2023, and highlights distinctive features of these policies. Singapore’s signature M&P Package has come a long way from its original version of measures geared towards encouraging married couples to have second and third births, to a much wider suite of benefits aimed at supporting citizens at various stages of family formation, and remains a work in progress. The essay discusses the evolution of policies in response to the fertility landscape towards identification of key levers and implementation of broad-based institutional changes, and explores remaining policy gaps, including supporting lower ages at childbearing and the unresolved conflict with human capital policies.
The policy of Housing First is a dramatic shift from the previous “staircase” approach in that it is aimed at providing housing upfront, without going through preparatory steps, to homeless people with alcohol dependence or mental issues, for whom housing access or independent living was deemed unfit in the past. This article introduces the background of Housing First policies in European countries, the achievements of these policies, and the Housing First Europe Hub, a coalition of organizations responsible for Housing First policies in Europe. This article goes on to outline the special features of the European Housing First policies and draw policy implications for Korea.
In the US, older adults are considered important social assets with experience and skills, and there are various volunteering and social participation programs that run on their active engagement. An estimated quarter of people aged 55 and older are known to participate in volunteering in the US, where the federal government is running its own volunteer program for older adults, known as AmeriCorps Seniors. The private sector is also highly involved in expanding opportunities for older adults to contribute to their communities. This article examines the participation of older adults in volunteering in the US and some of the senior volunteering programs run by the government and private organizations, and draws implications for the development of senior volunteering in Korea.
As the mental health of people has significantly deteriorated since COVID-19, the need has grown for expanding mental health services for at-risk individuals and vulnerable groups and responding actively to their needs. In his 2022 State of the Union Address, President Biden announced an initiative consisting of a large number of strategies and interventions to address mental health issues among Americans. In this context, the State of New York has taken several steps to better tackle people’s mental health problems. These steps include: expanding remote mental health care and making telemedicine a standard feature of mental health care; establishing a community mental health crisis care system; increasing the provision of community-based mental health services for improved access to care; instituting new qualification requirements for mental health paraprofessionals, such as peer specialists, to increase the care workforce to ensure continuous provision of mental care services; and vastly increasing spending for all of the mentioned.
With its social security spending growing rapidly and the thinning home care workforce becoming a serious issue, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare implemented LIFE, a long-term care information system, in 2021 with the aim of making in-home care services effective so as to promote self-reliance and prevent severe conditions from developing among older adults. LIFE, with a growing amount of data gathered from across the country on in-home care facilities and offices and service users and the status of their service receipt, is now able to provide evidence-based feedback information to providers and users alike. The Japanese government anticipates that the information system will help foster an encompassing virtuous cycle of less social security spending for the government, increased trust and work efficiency for providers, and enhanced quality of life and increased health life years (increased years of independent living) for older adults. The Japanese experience can have valuable implications for Korea.
The former Soviet Union’s health security system, commonly known as the Semashko Model, is primarily characterized by its provision of free-of-charge access to health services for all. The influence of the Semashko Model extended beyond the socialist bloc of Eastern Europe to other Western countries and even to the US. Meanwhile, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan surfaced on the world stage as emerging independent states. Both countries, from the beginning stages of their independence, even in the face of political, economic, and social hardships, exerted a great measure of effort to improve their deficient health care systems. There were moments of struggle in their course of trials and errors, but both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan today boast well-functioning universal health care systems. As efforts are underway to further advance their health care systems with e-health technologies, the prospect looms large for Korea, with its excellent track record of having a superior e-health system in place based on its outstanding information and communications technology, to collaborate with these Central Asian countries.
