Evaluation of the Family 500+ Programme: National and International Perspectives

Abstract

Adopted in April 2016 and then amended in July 2016, the Family 500+ programme is the controversial programme of Polish government, which actually supports all families with children by direct cash payments of PLN 500 without any income threshold. This article aims to evaluate the effectiveness of Family 500+ programme in accordance with its three declared goals, mainly to increase the fertility rates, to reduce poverty among families with children and to invest in families in general. The main research question is the following: does the Family 500+ programme reach its goals and at what costs? The hypothesis of the paper is built upon controversy regarding this programme, mainly a number of negative effects that might be caused by this initiative (e.g. a decrease in women’s professional activity) and its non-justification (unfair distribution of resources and political motives). The research method of this paper consists of desk review of relevant data from the Central Statistical Office (GUS) and Eurostat, as well as a range of elaborations conducted by independent researchers.

This paper consists of three parts. The first one is devoted to an international perspective, where there is presented an overview of family and child benefits expenditures among European countries and their impact on fertility rates. The second part presents a full range of Polish family and child benefits and the place of the Family 500+ programme within this system. The third section evaluates the implementation of direct goals of the programme, as well as its “side effects”. The conclusive part provides a summary, as well as further ideas regarding the programme improvement. The conclusions are still unclear. The first section proved that high child benefits do not guarantee high fertility rates and vice versa. The second part undermined credibility of the Family 500+ programme as a system of appropriate benefits with income threshold had already presented before. The third section contains a few conclusions: the first one is that there is no reason to argue that the Family 500+ programme increased Polish fertility rates; secondly, in addition to improving the economic situation of the poorest families with children, the lack of income threshold in the programme means unnecessary expenditures on families with good economic conditions; thirdly, an engagement of Polish women in labour market decreased since the implementation of the Family 500+ programme, which has negative effects on Polish economy.