Incentive Policies for Childbirth and Their Impact on the Willingness to Have Children: A Quantitative Study in the City of Islamabad-Gharb

The emerging phenomenon of low fertility in recent decades has led many countries to begin implementing policies aimed at supporting families and increasing fertility. Consequently, in Iran, the Family Support and Youth Population Law was approved and communicated in 2021. This research aims to examine the challenges of implementing this law and its strengths and weaknesses in the city of Islamabad-e Gharb in 2023. The research method is survey-based and is applied in nature. The data for the study were collected using a researcher-made questionnaire in 2022. The sample size included 374 visitors to health and treatment centers in the city of Islamabad-e Gharb, and a stratified multi-stage sampling method was used to determine the sample units. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS software version 22 and ordinal regression. The data analysis showed a significant and direct relationship between gender, socio-economic status, the value of incentives, insufficient incentives, and lack of government intervention in policymaking and the desire for childbearing. There is a significant and inverse relationship between education, employment status, distrust in incentive policies, and ambiguity in policymaking. The values of three statistics (Cox and Snell, Nagelkerke, and McFadden) related to the pseudo-R-squared indicated that the independent variables could explain 0.068 to 0.181 percent of the variance in the desire for childbearing. It seems that a package of tax benefits, cash benefits, and services may reduce the costs of raising children for parents. These packages can potentially create financial incentives for having more children.