From Rhetoric to Recognition

A fertility collapse with macroeconomic stakes

1.48TFR, Türkiye 2024 (all-time low; 2.10 = replacement, below OECD avg.)

2.6 → 1.48Fall in TFR since 2000 — ~one child in two decades

since 2008Pronatalist agenda & “≥3 children” calls — little measurable effect

Sustained sub-replacement fertility → population ageing, shrinking labor supply, pension strain: a first-order macro problem.
The puzzle: fertility keeps falling despite an active pronatalist agenda (Attar 2024). Cash and slogans have not worked.
This paper’s claim: the binding constraint is not income — it is the unequal division of unpaid work inside the household.

The question

Why does fertility keep falling in Turkey even as the state turns pronatalist — and what does this reveal about the limits of policy?

The argument, in one line

When women’s roles expand in the public sphere but expectations in the private sphere stay rigid, fertility decline becomes self-sustaining — and cash incentives cannot fix a constraint that lives inside the household.

From the Q–Q tradeoff to a fertility puzzle

Theoretical framework · 1 of 3

Galor’s Unified Growth Theory (Galor 2011): development raises returns to education → parents trade child quantity for quality → fertility falls toward replacement.
Becker & Lewis (1973): the classic quantity–quality tradeoff — rising incomes raise the “full” price of each child.
But fertility did not stabilize. Many rich economies fell to “lowest-low” territory (TFR < 1.3).
Ahn & Mira (2002); Feyrer et al. (2008): the historic negative FLFP–fertility link reversed across the OECD.

The puzzle

Why does fertility collapse in some countries but not others — under similar income and female education?

Sweden vs. South Korea: both FLFP > 70%, yet TFR 1.66 vs. 0.84.

Income and preferences alone cannot explain the divergence.

Goldin (2024): fertility as a credibility problem

Theoretical framework · 2 of 3

Goldin, Babies and the Macroeconomy (2024): the speed and sequence of modernization drive persistent decline.
A birth happens only when a woman expects credible support — from a partner and institutions — to combine children with a career.
Under “greedy jobs” (Goldin 2014), flexibility carries a steep wage penalty \((\bar{w}-w)\); women cannot simply buy their way out.
Bargaining & norms (Chiappori 1992; Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan 2015) plus persistent time-use gaps (Bianchi et al. 2012) lower the effective \(p\).

The mismatch model

A woman becomes a mother iff:

\(p \cdot (\bar{w}-w) \le K\)

\(p\) = probability of credible support
\(K\) = value of children
\(\bar{w}-w\) = career penalty of flexibility

Low \(p\) or high penalty → rational childlessness, even when \(K\) is high.

Where credibility comes from — and why generosity ≠ credibility

Theoretical framework · 3 of 3

Labor-market rigidities

Greedy jobs & the motherhood penalty (Goldin 2014; Guner, Kaya, and Sánchez-Marcos 2020).
Job insecurity & volatility depress births (Adserà 2004; Sommer 2016; Lopes 2020).

Household constraints

Intensive parenting raises the time cost, mostly on mothers (Doepke and Zilibotti 2019).
Paternal involvement & paid paternity leave raise fertility (Doepke and Kindermann 2019).

Welfare-state design

Spending & leave help (Gauthier 2007; Thévenon 2011) — but design beats generosity.
Access & reliability decisive; badly-designed leave backfires (Del Boca, Pasqua, and Pronzato 2009; Olivetti and Petrongolo 2017).

…and in the Turkish case

Family-centered welfare regime places care on the household (Buğra and Keyder 2005; Grütjen 2008); intergenerational norms sustain traditional roles even among educated women (Kavas and Thornton 2013; Kavas and Jong 2020).
High ideal but falling intended fertility; risk of a “one-child norm” (Abbasoğlu Özgören and Türkyılmaz 2023; Keskin and Çavlin 2023; Greulich, Dasré, and Inan 2016).

The scissors: participation up, fertility down

Evidence · Figure 1

Female LFPR & TFR, Türkiye 2000–2024. Source: World Bank (2025).

What it shows

Female LFPR rose ~25% → 47% as TFR fell 2.6 → 1.48.
The lines cross around 2011–2013: the two trends move in opposite directions within one generation.
Descriptive co-movement consistent with the mismatch: as women enter public life, fertility falls — because work–care conditions are insufficient.

Cross-country: the unpaid-labor gap predicts fertility

Evidence · Figure 2

Daily unpaid-work gap (min) vs. TFR, OECD. Goldin (2024) method, time-use 2009–2019.

What it shows

Negative slope: TFR = 1.96 − 0.0032·gap, R² = 0.33 — about a third of cross-country fertility variation tracks the gap.
Even distribution (Sweden, France, New Zealand) → TFR ≈ 1.7–2.1.
Türkiye is the far-right outlier — the largest gap (~235 min/day) and one of the lowest TFRs, alongside Japan & Korea.

Public advancement, private stagnation

The mechanism in Türkiye

≈ 30 hWomen’s weekly unpaid domestic & care work (Şahanoğulları+ 2024)

3× / 2×3× men’s hours; the gap is 2× the OECD average

1.4–3.3%Est. value of unpaid care as share of GDP (Aran & Aktakke 2016)

Women gained public-sphere roles without shedding private-sphere ones — the classic “second shift”.
In Goldin’s terms, support is not credible (low \(p\)) → the effective cost of a child stays high → births are delayed or forgone.
This is why Turkey is a striking Group-2 case: strong modernization, weak domestic convergence — the same logic as Japan, Korea, Southern Europe.

A shift in the pronatalist script (Erdoğan, 2025)

From rhetoric…

At the 2025 Family and Culture-Art Symposium, the President noted TFR is 1.38 for employed women vs. 1.72 for others — but stressed employment is not the cause. Women are “increasingly left alone” in childrearing; “most of the burden unfortunately falls on women’s shoulders.”

First high-level acknowledgment that household gender asymmetry — not merely economics or values — underlies the decline.
The diagnosis moves inside the home; he urges fathers to “share responsibilities more fairly.”
But recognition in a speech is not reform in institutions — the paper’s pivot.

Cash is not enough — the constraint is structural

…to recognition

Why current policy underdelivers

Incentives & family programs target income — not the unequal division of care.
They leave the domestic labor split untouched, so the child’s effective cost stays on women.
Predictable result: a limited, short-lived fertility response (Attar 2024).

What structural reform requires

Fair parental leave — including well-paid, father-reserved leave (Doepke and Kindermann 2019).
Accessible, affordable childcare as a genuine entitlement.
Societal re-valuation of domestic & care work as shared, not female, labor.

Only reforms that make support credible — for men to share and institutions to deliver — raise \(p\) and relax the constraint on fertility.

From rhetoric to recognition — and the road to reform

Conclusion

Turkey’s fertility decline is a Goldin-type mismatch: fast public-sphere modernization, rigid private-sphere norms (Fig. 1).
The binding constraint is the unpaid-labor gap — the cross-OECD pattern places Turkey as the extreme case (Fig. 2).
2025 marks a genuine discursive shift: the state now names the household burden. Recognition has arrived.
But recognition is not reform. Cash cannot substitute for shared, credible care.
Contribution: a macro-grounded, policy-relevant reading that moves the pronatalist debate from wallets to households.

Next step: measuring “credible support” across the OECD — the Credible Support Index (\(p\) operationalized for 32 countries).

Thank you

Questions & discussion welcome

Gül Ertan Özgüzer Izmir University of Economics, Türkiye gulozguzer@gmail.com

56th EBES Conference · Empirical Studies in Economics and Finance III