The relationship between the cost of child rearing and mother’s employment in comparative perspective

It is indicated that one of the major factors that make the difference between reality and desire for a large number of children in Japan is mothers’ employment, after controlling for demographic factors. Few studies have examined the relationship between mothers’ employment and the number of children in terms of the expenditure of child-rearing with the impact of macro factors such as government policy taken into consideration.
　
This paper aims to conduct a cross-national analysis of the impact of these macro factors on the relationship between mothers’ employment and the expenditure of child-rearing, using micro data from five developed countries.

A multiple regression analysis was conducted using pooled data from five countries as a preliminary analysis. Consequently, we found that child-rearing expenditure was the lowest in France regardless of the youngest child’s age and mother’s employment. In the U.S.A, Japan and Korea, the expenditure of rearing older children was higher when mothers were in paid employment. We will conduct further analysis to investigate the factors causing these results, taking account of the macro context such as the difference between countries in terms of tax systems, childcare services, education expenses in household budgets and price level.