What one country’s experiment says about attempts to boost birth rates

And it may be that culture matters more than cash. “Part of the problem is we overestimate how much finances work,” says Carney. Israel, the only country in the OECD with a fertility rate that is comfortably above replacement, doesn’t have particularly high levels of government spending on family benefits. But it does have a strong cultural and ideological focus on having children – informed partly by the desire to rebuild the Jewish population after the horror of the Holocaust.

“But the government’s ability to shift culture is very limited,” Carney warns, “And part of the peril of the government weighing in on the culture is it could politicise it.”

In some countries, that backlash is already visible. In South Korea, for example, survey research has found many young women resisting marriage and family as a protest against what they see as patriarchal ideas of a traditional family.

France, by contrast, has resisted some of Europe’s fertility decline. Its rate of 1.6 is among the highest in the EU. It has comparatively high public spending and a greater focus on work-life balance than many of its neighbours.

South Korea does not have that flexibility. “For men there is this kind of traditional notion of breadwinners, so they often come from home very late at night,” says Sobotka. “This is punishing for both women and men, but also for family life.” Child-rearing is left to women. Women also face “anticipatory discrimination”, he adds, “often women are either withdrawing from the labour market or getting into part-time or unstable jobs around the time when they have kids.”

Similarly, flexibility at work is not present in Hungary. “Even state-owned companies are not flexible, they do not take into account the fact that men and women both may have responsibilities outside of the labour market,” says Fodor.

The Orbán government spent around 5% of GDP on its family-friendly initiatives and they were seemingly popular enough that Hungary’s new leader Peter Magyar didn’t campaign on changing them.

“We are living in societies where parenthood is extremely expensive. So whatever different countries can do to support parents and support families is a good policy,” says Sobotka.

Fodor takes a different view: “If that money had been spent on social institutions and… gender equality and promoting men’s role in domestic work, I think a similar increase in the fertility rate could have been achieved.”

Barbara and Levi’s situation is not unique. The Hungarian National Bank reports that one in five couples who took the loans five years ago didn’t end up having children. The new Hungarian government said it was reviewing these policies and looking at what should happen when people take out loans but don’t have the children they said they intended to have.