R. F. Harrod on Reviving the Birth Rate

Continuing below‐replacement fertility and projected declines in population size are demographic features of many European countries and Japan. They are variously met with complacent acceptance, calls for higher rates of immigration, or—often last and least—proposals for increasing the birth rate. Fertility was also low in the 1930s, and some of the policy debate from that period resonates today. In England and Wales, fertility then had been declining for half a century. Over the decade 1931–40, it averaged 1.8 children per woman—moreover, with net emigration. Worries over this situation and its likely consequences led to the setting up in 1944 of a Royal Commission on Population, charged with considering “what measures, if any, should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend in population.” In a memorandum submitted to the Commission in that year, the economist R. F. Harrod set out a detailed proposal to encourage childbearing through a scheme of family endowments. Part of the introductory section of Harrod's submission, arguing the case for state intervention and for material rather than ‘spiritual’ measures, is reproduced below. An evident problem in offering economic incentives for childbearing is that, to induce a given behavioral change, well‐off families would require much larger incentives than the poor. Hence child endowments that aspire to effectiveness across the income distribution have to be skewed toward the upper end. Harrod argues that this is as it should be, that policy should establish neutrality between large and small family sizes, and that this is a conceptually separate issue from poverty alleviation. ‘We should seek a re‐distribution of national income favourable to the parents of larger families and the plan should be put into effect whether or not another re‐distribution as between rich and poor is proceeding at the same time.’ He remarks on the implausibility of the government's being able to ‘talk up’ fertility— thereby generating some kind of costless ideational change, a ‘spiritual aufklärung.’ Later pans of the submission not reprinted here cover the specific details of the proposal. The proposed annual benefit per child (intended for every child after the second, with half‐rates payable for the second child) is paid for 18 years. It is substantial and increases with the child's age—at ages 13–18, for most of the income range it amounts to 20–30 percent of the father's income (or mother's, if hers is higher). Harrod also discusses further the rationale for making the endowments (and the compulsory contributions—a flat 5 percent of income—that finance them) proportional to income. To make his case Harrod draws on the dysgenic and population‐quality arguments popular at the time: worry about ‘race decline’ and ‘a general lowering of standards and of efficiency if the parents who are best equipped in experience, knowledge and culture are relatively infertile.’ In the event, the Commission recommended a flat schedule of family allowances, together with tax exemptions for dependent children calculated to provide some income‐based benefit. These were justified on population as well as equity and welfare grounds, ‘since the handicaps of parenthood have played a large part in the fall of average family size below replacement level.‘ Population quality issues—the subject of several other submissions—were sidestepped by calling for further research. By the time the Commission's report was finally published, in 1949, the baby boom was well underway: average fertility over 1946–50 was 2.4. Roy Forbes Harrod (1900–78) was one of the foremost economists of his day. His career was largely spent at Christ Church College, Oxford. A student and sometime colleague of Keynes, his best‐known early work was centered on identifying a dynamic equilibrium growth path for the economy—building on Keynes's static equilibrium analysis. As stylized (by others), this came to be called the Harrod‐Domar growth model, a formulation basic to growth theory. Harrod was editor of the Economic Journal for the period 1945–66. He was active in politics and as an economic adviser to both Labour and Conservative governments. He was knighted in 1959. The extract is reprinted from volume 5 of the Papers of the Royal Commission on Population (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1950), pp. 80–85.