COVID-19 policy interventions and fertility dynamics in the context of pre-pandemic welfare support

This paper focuses on nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to explain fertility dy-namics during the pandemic, while considering countries’ institutional context. Weargue that containment policies disrupted people’s lives and increased their uncer-tainty more in countries with weak welfare support systems, while health-relatedand economic support NPIs mitigated such disruptions much more there, as theywere less expected by citizens. We estimate monthly “excess” crude birth rates (CBRs)and find that countries with low public support—Southern Europe, East Asia, andEastern Europe—experienced larger decreases and less of a rebound in CBRs thancountries with histories of high public spending—Western, Central, and NorthernEurope. However, in low support countries, NPIs are much more strongly associ-ated with excess CBRs—containment NPIs more negatively and health and economicsupport NPIs more positively—with the exception of the one-month lag of contain-ment NPIs, for which the opposite holds. When putting these coefficients into broaderperspective, our findings suggest that the actual implementation of all NPIs takentogether mitigated fertility declines. This is especially the case for low public supportcountries, whereas one might have seen a birth decline even in high support countriesif the NPIs were not implemented.