No/Low Cost Way For Local Governments To Boost Birthrates (Before Spending)
If you run a city and you don’t know where to start on birthrates, start by improving how your government operates and how it communicates.
Key facts
61% of young unmarried Japanese adults knew nothing about any of the 17 family benefits their government already provides. Telling them what existed raised strong marital intentions by 25% (Gong and Wang 2021).
Across 216 European regions, a 1% increase in government quality is associated with an ~8% increase in fertility (Giannantoni and Rodriguez-Pose 2025).
Fun Fact! Akashi City paid for their pronatalist programs, at first, with budget cuts in other areas, and later on with tax revenue from new residents moving in AND more births.
Here is a partial list of things a local government can do to raise birthrates at little or no cost: publish a single clear guide to every family benefit the city already offers. Enforce the familial status protections that have been federal law since 1988. Switch parking requirements from per-bedroom to per-unit so developers stop paying a penalty for building three-bedroom apartments. Announce the locations and timelines of planned daycare centers before they open, not after. Shorten permitting review for small residential projects from twelve months to 90 days. Audit the benefit application process and ask whether a 25-year-old first-time parent could complete it without help.
None of these require new legislation. None require new revenue. And the evidence we review here says they matter more than the expensive programs cities typically reach for first.
We want to make an argument that will sound, at first, like we are telling local officials to do nothing. We are not. We are telling them to do the thing that matters as more of a prerequisite/corequisite and costs the least, before they do the things will cost a lot of money.
The lowest cost investment (in the long term) a city can make to support family formation is not a new subsidy, a new program, or a new department. It is making the existing institutional machinery work as designed: delivering services reliably, communicating intentions clearly, and earning the trust of households deciding whether this is a place where they can raise a child. You will need to spend money in the mid-to-long term. Right now we are talking about the lowest hanging (and cheapest) fruit to a very complex and expensive phenomenon.
The same insight, two directions
Quality Theorist Joseph Juran argued that organizations waste 20-40% of their total effort on rework and correcting failures that should never have occurred. Quality is free, because the money is already being spent on failure. A government office that takes 45 days to process a childcare application is not saving money. It is spending money on confusion and abandoned applications while telling every household that encounters the process: this system does not work.
Rory Sutherland arrived at the same place from the demand side. The UK government spent £6 billion shaving 40 minutes off the London-to-Paris Eurostar. Sutherland’s counter-proposal: for a fraction of that cost, improve the onboard experience so passengers would ask the trains to slow down. People do not evaluate a service by its technical specifications. They evaluate it by how it feels to use.
These are not identical claims. Juran is talking about process efficiency; Sutherland about subjective experience. But they reinforce each other. Fixing how your system operates is not separate from fixing how your system is perceived. Treating them as two different departments is how cities end up with announcements nobody believes and services nobody knows about.
Akashi’s former mayor Fusaho Izumi understood this intuitively. In 2016, before introducing free nursery school for second children, he opened a children’s complex in front of Akashi Station: a play space, a library with four times the floor area, drop-in childcare, family counselors, a parenting hotline. He had evicted the pachinko parlors and consumer loan offices to build it (one sued; the case went to Japan’s Supreme Court; Izumi won). His logic, explained in multiple Japanese-language interviews: parents will not trust any sort of subsidy unless they can see the system it is embedded in. The library, the play space, the counselors were the trust infrastructure that made later financial benefits credible.
Why does this matter for fertility? Because having a child is not a transaction. It is a decades-long bet on the institutional environment. Will the schools function? Will the clinic be there at 2 a.m.? Will the childcare subsidy actually arrive?
The evidence
In a national survey experiment published in Demography, Gong and Wang (20212) found that 61% of young unmarried Japanese adults knew nothing about any of the 17 family benefits their government provides. Zero out of seventeen. After the treatment group was shown what the policies were, strong marital intentions rose by 25%. No new spending occurred. The effect was largest among highly educated women and both low- and highly educated men, the groups facing the highest perceived costs of marriage under traditional gender norms. The information changed what people thought the costs were.
Okamoto (2026) modeled Japan’s demographic trajectory in a dynamic lifecycle simulation and found that merely announcing a childcare subsidy reform one to five years before it takes effect increases the long-run stabilized population by up to 7.6%. Even granting the usual caveats about models, the logic is hard to dismiss: if households plan ahead, credible information changes outcomes independently of the policy itself. The marginal cost of a public announcement is, to a first approximation, zero.
Across 216 regions in 18 European countries, Giannantoni and Rodriguez-Pose (2025) found that a 1% increase in regional government quality is associated with an approximately 8% increase in fertility. The European Quality of Government Index is built not from spending data but from citizen surveys about perceptions and experiences of public services: healthcare, education, administration, corruption. Institutional quality and female employment were the two most consequential predictors. The contrast is stark at the regional level. Stockholm’s female employment rate is 81%; Campania’s is 27.7%. Italian regions like Sardegna (fertility rate: 1.09) do not lack family benefit programs. The money goes in; the experienced quality does not come out.
On that note, there is another finding from the same European data deserves particular attention. Temporary contract and gig work actually discourages childbearing. You cannot offer someone flexibility and insecurity in the same instrument and expect them to take a twenty-year bet on it.
Supporting evidence from the Japanese municipal data: municipalities where residents work locally show higher desired birth rates (0.19 SD). Car commuters outperform train commuters, not on speed but on flexibility for unexpected daycare pickups. Community festivals correlate with higher desired rates (0.13), likely through the informal childcare networks they sustain. Tokunoshima Town maintains Japan’s highest actual fertility rate at 2.25 largely through organic social support rather than formal programs.
A caveat: the Gong and Wang experiment measures stated intentions, not births, and the cross-sectional studies cannot rule out unmeasured confounders. But the pattern is consistent across three continents, five independent research teams, and radically different institutional contexts. At some point, convergent evidence earns the benefit of the doubt.
What cities can do Monday morning
The honest answer to “what should we do?” is simpler than you want it to be. Improve how your government operates and how it communicates.
This sounds circular. A city with weak institutions is not good at strengthening its own institutions. But the circularity breaks when you think of institutional capacity not as comprehensive reform but as a sequence of visible wins, each building credibility for the next. Some of you are going to go “I just don’t think the government can reform at any level”. Drawing on American History, former Treasury Secretary John Snyder, facing a corrupt IRS in the late 1940s, started by automating one calculation on one tax form in one office in Cincinnati. When that worked, other offices tried it. When those succeeded, he reworked the forms. When Congress saw results, they approved the structural reforms he could not have gotten on day one. We still have a lot of these super effective reform programs (or at least the documents and books). Kevin Hawickhorst has documented this stuff, especially on how WW2-era Bureau of the Budget’s work simplification program applied these same methods across federal management. The approach is Juran’s and Deming’s, and it was built for government before it was exported to industry.
Nagareyama’s Mayor Yoshiharu Izaki did the same thing in a municipal context. His first moves in 2003 were not about children at all. On day one he halted a ¥1 billion over-budget recreational facility under construction. He required three competitive bids for all contracts above ¥1.3 million; previously, everything under ¥150 million had been sole-sourced. That single change cut the cost of equivalent projects by 40%. He compressed the city plan from 600 pages across four volumes to one volume. He froze new hiring for three years. None of this was family policy; it was operational triage that created the fiscal room for everything that followed.
We have spent several thousand words arguing against new programs and are now going to recommend four specific actions. Three are not new programs: enforcement of existing law, removal of existing regulations, and better planning of services already being provided. Only the fourth is genuinely new, designed as the smallest viable version of itself.
1. Enforce family protections already on the books.
In the US, we have the Fair Housing Act which prohibited familial status discrimination since 1988. Familial status complaints were the fourth most common type filed with HUD in 2021, roughly 7% of all complaints. A California property management company recently paid $3 million to settle charges for prohibiting children from playing outdoors. Landlords still deny leases because a child would share a bedroom.
Audit your complaint pipeline, and not just for housing. Routine testing, especially for fair housing. Publicize protections in plain language. Housing alone, attorneys report that much of this discrimination is not invidious; landlords assume children will be noisy or that siblings cannot share a room. Laws are most likely there. Someone has to turn it on.
2. Deregulate housing. Fully, if you can. Selectively, if you must.
My first-best recommendation is straightforward: abolish parking minimums, eliminate single-family-only zoning, liberalize floor area ratios, allow single-stair residential buildings up to six stories, and cut permitting timelines to 90 days for projects under 50 units. Let people build housing. The evidence that restrictive land use regulation constrains housing supply, raises costs, and drives families to the exurbs is overwhelming and does not need rehearsing here.
I recognize that full liberalization is politically difficult in most cities, especially in America and the UK. For cities that cannot get there in one move, a narrower version still helps: target the regulations that specifically penalize family-sized units.
Per-bedroom parking means every additional bedroom triggers additional land cost. Developers respond rationally: they build studios. The share of new apartments with three or more bedrooms has fallen from 7–11% in the 1990s to 5% today.* Switching to per-unit parking removes this penalty at zero cost. An FAR exemption for three-plus bedroom units expands the option set. Allowing single-stair buildings up to four stories opens the floor space a third bedroom would occupy. None require spending. All remove barriers. And each builds the political credibility for the next, larger reform.
3. Plan and communicate family-friendly amenity infrastructure, in sequence, with advance notice (or like Nagareyama advertise what you do have).
Choi et al. (2026) identified distance thresholds: public daycare within 400 meters, clinics within 200 meters, elementary schools within 820 meters. When your city sites a daycare it is already going to build, the decision should use distance-to-residential-concentration data, not merely coverage ratios. Planning with walkable distance costs no more. It requires a different map.
If your municipality will open three daycare centers over five years, announce the locations and timeline now. The announcement costs nothing.
Just to reference previous cases (I promise I will bring in a lot of fresh cases in future articles). Yeonggwang County in South Korea (population 53,000, no subway, no university, no tech industry) has sustained the highest total fertility rate in the country for six consecutive years, reaching 2.54 in 2019 and holding at 1.71 in 2024, more than double the national average. It began with the smallest necessary infrastructure: in 2015, recruiting a delivery-capable obstetrics clinic and establishing a public postpartum care center, eliminating ninety-minute “expedition births.” That first win funded the second. In 2018 the county created a dedicated population policy department, a national first among basic local governments, which enabled lifecycle programs with 94 support items documented in a single guide distributed to every resident.* Each phase was bigger than the last.
Akashi city in Japan hit 1.65 against a national 1.3 by reallocating budget from public works to child welfare. Izumi classified every municipal program into four categories: must, better-to-do-than-not, optional, and don’t. He halted public housing construction (the city had enough) and cut the sewer plan from ¥60 billion to ¥15 billion.** No new revenue. Freed budget went to children’s medical care first (the cheapest and most visible benefit), then the station-front children’s complex, then free nursery for second children, then free school lunches. Each phase was funded by the population growth the previous phase attracted; by 2019, Izumi had paid off ¥10 billion in city debt and grown reserves from ¥7 billion to ¥10 billion.**
Nagareyama reached 1.50 by solving one specific problem first: commuter parents could not physically get children to scattered nurseries and still make the train. The city built station-based transit childcare at two stations. Parents drop children off by 7 a.m.; dedicated buses collect up to 100 children per morning and distribute them to nurseries across the city. The process reverses by 6 p.m., with extension to 8 p.m. Cost to parents: ¥100/day.
4. Build a local partnership to ramp up family-sized apartment development.
The family-sized apartment market has a structural information failure that operational improvements alone cannot fix.
Developers are not building family-sized units despite strong demand because the industry’s financial assumptions are wrong. Stone and Fijan (2025) document the gap: studios have vacancy rates of ~8% versus 4-5% for three-bedrooms, higher rent-to-income ratios (32% vs. 25-26%), and shorter tenure (23.5 vs. 29.2 months). When these differentials are incorporated, effective rental returns on three-bedroom units are 29-50% higher than on studios. But the industry prices buildings using flat vacancy assumptions across unit types. A survey of over 6,000 Americans found bedroom count is by far the most important apartment feature for people considering children, more influential than 600-900 additional square feet or $1,500 in monthly rent.
The city’s role: publish vacancy and turnover data developers can cite in investor presentations. Convene a working group with developers, lenders, and municipal agencies responsible for childcare siting, benefit awareness, and permitting. Offer pre-approved design templates and expedited permitting. Start with one developer, one project, one neighborhood. Prove the pro forma works with accurate data. Fill it. Document the results.
Why cities get this wrong
Juran distinguished between the “breakthrough” mentality and the “control” mentality. Organizations love breakthroughs: new programs, new departments, press conferences. They are bored by control, the steady maintenance of existing processes at high quality. Fixing the online portal so parents can find benefits that already exist does not make the evening news. Yet the evidence here says the portal fix matters more.
There is also a tolerance problem. Every case in this article has a period where the inputs are happening but the outputs have not appeared. Akashi’s Izumi put it bluntly: “For the first five or six years, nobody evaluated what we were doing. It was a tough period.” Nagareyama’s Izaki lost his first mayoral election in 1999 and spent four years holding town meetings before winning on his second attempt.* Most governments abandon a strategy during the silent years. The ones that succeed are the ones that don’t.
Cities also organize as if operations and communications are separate functions. One department processes claims; a different office talks about policy; neither thinks about the other. Announcements without follow-through, delivery without visibility.
When you do spend: budget priorities and local targeting
Everything above is about making existing systems work before spending new money. But eventually you will spend, and when you do, two findings should govern how.
Across all 1,741 Japanese municipalities, Kawasaki and Morimoto (2025) found that the share of the municipal budget allocated to child welfare is the single most powerful predictor of desired birth rates. The coefficient (0.47) dwarfs density, transit access, income, facility counts, and commute patterns. Kasuga Town in Fukuoka allocates roughly 41% of its budget to child welfare, triple the comparable average. Tokyo and Osaka show large fertility penalties (-0.26 standard deviations); Nagoya, equally dense and wealthy, shows none. The difference is budget priorities. The urban fertility penalty is not structural fate but an institutional decision.
How much to allocate is the first question. Where to aim it is the second. Lee (2024) analyzed all 229 South Korean municipalities and found that the same national childbirth benefit produced significant positive effects in Jeolla and Gangwon provinces and zero measurable effect in Seoul’s 25 districts. Survey evidence showed that Jeolla and Gangwon had the highest demand for economic support around childbirth; cash addressed their actual constraint. In Seoul the binding constraint is housing cost or career interruption risk, which creates an incredible amount of leakage. The money did not fail, and cash benefits have a long and rich history of working against tailwinds. Cash benefits work best on a national level, and it’s your job on the local level to address constraints before giving local benefits.
The foundation before the edifice
Across every evidence base in this article, institutional quality, communication, and budget priorities predict fertility better than spending levels or program generosity. And Yeonggwang, Akashi, and Nagareyama demonstrate what happens when a municipality builds the operational infrastructure first and uses each success to justify the next: outcomes that diverge from national averages by a factor of two or more.
You will need to spend the money sooner or later, most likely sooner. But the return on that spending is determined by the operational quality of the system through which it flows.
If you run a city and you don’t know where to start, pick up Juran or Deming. Try out Work Simplification (we have an online copy right here!). Walk through your own processes. Find out what your city offers families, and find out whether families know it exists. Fix one thing residents will notice, and fix it completely. Then fix the next thing, and make it bigger. The operation is the message. Start there.