The Credit Aspect of Family Policy: a Critical Analysis of Foreign and Russian Experience

The continued decline in the birth rate in developed countries raises serious concerns not only in the demographic community, but also among national Governments. This process, which has been going on for several decades, is becoming a threat to the maintenance of a wide variety of spheres of society in its current form – starting from the constantly decreasing labor market and ending with a drop in mobilization reserves in the context of the country's defense capability. At the same time, at the moment, the research community has not identified such methods of increasing fertility, which, if used by the state, could reverse existing processes and increase the total fertility rate above the level of simple reproduction of the population in those countries where it has already fallen below. At the moment, developed countries use more than a dozen different measures of state family policy, the main purpose of which is to increase the birth rate. In this study, I tried to analyze the use of specific credit methods of family policy, such as preferential mortgages, maternity capital and preferential loans with a reduced interest rate (or none at all). The study examined not only the variability of such methods, but also the economic and demographic context of a given country and other methods of family policy used in it - with the help of their consideration, we can understand in detail which policies the state relies on. The study of countries in the study is divided into three chapters, each of which corresponds to one model of the capitalist system according to the typology of the Danish sociologist Gesta Esping-Andersen. At the same time, it is important to note that qualitative methods are used in the study, which does not allow us to talk about the effectiveness of one or another method – in the work we only outline a list of credit methods of family policy and make reasonable but cautious assumptions about their impact on the country's fertility in this economic and demographic context and with the existing features of the introduction of one or another a different method. Keywords: fertility, preferential mortgage, maternity capital, credit methods of family policy, family policy.