Baby grant no magic fix

The Tobago House of Assembly's (THA) baby grant is intended to address a problem plaguing most countries. Unfortunately, not one policy tried anywhere has helped raise births to the necessary levels. The world's declining birthrates mean that many nations have a workforce that is both ageing and getting smaller, with young people facing increasing tax (and personal) burdens to support the older population. The replacement rate—ie, births required for a population to maintain its current size—is 2.1 children per woman. Trinidad and Tobago's total fertility rate (TFR), according to (outdated) figures from the Central Statistical Office (CSO), is 1.7. And THA Chief Secretary Farley Augustine, in a speech last year, revealed that Tobago's birthrate had dropped from 900 births annually to just over 400, putting Tobago's TFR at roughly 0.6. So this is an urgent problem the THA is trying to solve by giving parents $500 per month for every child for the first five years of the child's life. As Chief Secretary Augustine noted, 'I know that can't mind a child, but that will stop a hole.' The question is, will the grant incentivise more women to have more children? And, if it does, will those women be in a stable relationship? Figures from the 2022 Multiple Cluster Indicators Survey (MICS) show that just 41% of Tobagonian children live with both parents, compared to a national rate of 51%. And children from single-mother households are more likely to be delinquent and underperform academically. Thus, even if the baby grant does raise Tobago's TFR, it may also exacerbate social issues. That can be offset by giving the grant only to married couples, and perhaps only to couples within the lower income brackets. The data, however, suggest that the grant is unlikely to have any impact at all. Currently, the global TFR stands at 2.2, according to the World Bank, while figures from the United Nations Population Division show that the average TFR for the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries is 1.4 and, for the East Asian bloc, even lower at 1.0. The UN's population dashboard shows that about 43% of the world's countries (101 out of 237) have TFRs of 2.1 and above, with the five highest in sub-Saharan Africa. A few places have had limited success in raising their TFRs through a combination of policies like tax benefits for families, subsidised childcare, and goods vouchers (Zhang, 2023). In Spain and Quebec, extended paternity leave correlated with an increase in births, but the effects were specific to certain cohorts, not all women (Regueiro-Ons et al, 2026; Laplante, 2024). And no developed country or region has been able to raise its TFR to replacement levels. What all this means is that while Tobago's baby grant is a good start, much more analysis needs to be done. That must begin by tracking births among the women who get the monthly allowance. And, since Trinidad has the same problem, the Central Government might do well to follow the sister isle's lead.