Incentives and population decline

There has been some interesting debate in the US about population decline spurred by Putin's state of the union address. (One example is here.) In that address he offered financial incentives to get women to have children. The point for Russia is that it's in demographic freefall; they're losing 700,000 a year. Ukraine is in the same boat per capita though it has a smaller population. But the same factors are at work here.

I can tell you though that the program here to get women to have more children has been a bust. The incentive was 8000 hyrvna last year, or about $1600. Thats a pretty good sum for Ukraine. It's about 8 months pay on average.

But that 8000 hryvna only succeeded in raising the birthrate by a half of one percent. That doesn't sound like much of an increase. The budgeteers may be happy with this but the demographers may not be.