Despite being a positive measure to promote co-responsibility in care, the extension of paternity leave from two to twelve weeks has not modified the number total births in Spain. This is according to research conducted by researchers from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, who are attached to the Health Economics and Public Policy Research Group.
The public university concludes that the extension of paternity leave by itself does not entail a growth in births, but rather needs other measures of support for families. Among them, it proposes childcare subsidies or greater flexibility in the workplace.
The study started from the need to evaluate the effectiveness of family reconciliation policies, and within these, more specifically, paternity policies, as a public policy tool whose purpose is to promote greater fertility, that is, to encourage the population to have more children.
Through the use of national birth registries and statistical techniques, with which to simulate what would have happened had the leave not been extended, the authors found, on the one hand, that there was no significant impact on the number of births, and on the other, that certain groups did feel relevant effects from this measure: third-child births, which rose by 8.4%, and births to working mothers, which doubled. According to them, these effects were maintained for at least two years after the first change in the leave, although subsequent extensions did not generate additional changes in fertility. The study covered data from 2006 to 2022.
Public measures to implement paternity leave
For this reason, the authors understand that the extension of paternity leave, by itself, is not enough, and that public measures and policies aimed at supporting families must be implemented so that women between 25 and 44 years old who have not had their first child decide to have one. It is worth remembering that Spain has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, with 1.12 children per woman in 2023.
In any case, the authors also warn that these results should be interpreted with caution, given the limitation of available data or the difficulty of generalizing the findings given the heterogeneity of contexts and situations.
The journal Applied Economic Analysis publishes the results of this work, which bears the signature of doctoral student Camila Regueiro Ons, and of the professors of the Department of Quantitative Methods in Economics and Management, Jaime Pinilla and Beatriz González López Valcárcel.
