Conclusions from Paper on Quebec's Universal Child Care Program
Photo by Erika Fletcher on Unsplash
Childcarepolicy.net offers a review of Sebastien Montpetit’s analysis of the impacts of Quebec’s universal child care program. Montpetit’s paper has been selected as one of three finalists for the Canadian Labour Economics Forum prize.
Sebastien Montpetit, a Canadian from Quebec who has is preparing for his PhD in Economics at the University of Toulouse in France, has led a research team analysing the impacts of Quebec’s universal child care program introduced in the late 1990’s.
In an article for Childcarepolicy.net, Gordan Cleveland reviewed the complex, multi-faceted report and identified main conclusions.
“The importance of the supply of child care services has been underrated. Greater supply of child care – availability – is as important as improvements in affordability…. Lowering fees without increasing coverage has modest effects on the benefits to families.”
There are non-monetary benefits as well as economic benefits for mothers. “Think of this as work-family balance, things like the reduced search time for child care, the shorter distances that have to be travelled each day when child care is much more available and affordable. When all the benefits are summed, benefits total more than 3.5 dollars of benefit per dollar of net government spending – more than twice the benefit that comes from looking only at increased mothers’ earnings.”
“Earnings gains for mothers impacted by Quebec’s child care reforms are concentrated in the fifth through the eighth decile of income…. These are mothers who will not be reached by a targeted approach to child care spending.” This indicates that universal child care not only allows women to enter the workforce but may assist women to rise in the workforce. “A universal approach may therefore be more fiscally responsible than targeted child care initiatives.”
Responding to earlier studies that have indicated negative effects on children who participated in the early years of universal child care in Quebec, including negative educational impacts and increased juvenile criminality, the current paper looked on current longitudinal data on the same cohort and finds that there has been no evidence of disparity of educational attainment in comparison to the rest of Canada for this group and that any increase in criminality was very minor, indicating that the societal cost of universal child care has been relatively small. The study has developed these conclusions using data from the National Longitudinal Study on Children and Youth, along with data from the Canadian Censuses of 2016 and 2021.
Using new data on regional child care coverage rates, the study found “that in regions where child care supply increased the most, employment and child care use increased much more”, increasing mothers’ labour force participation by 40% in regions where child care supply expanded, as opposed to other regions. “Results suggest that for highly educated mothers with a post-secondary qualification, the main incentive to take up employment was the fee reduction. For mothers without a post-secondary qualification, access to a space was key.”
“In order to look at children’s educational attainment later in life, Sebastien employs a triple-difference model which compares education levels of same age individuals born before or after the reforms in Quebec to similar individuals in the rest of Canada. The paper concludes: ‘We find no evidence of negative effects on educational attainment of eligible children in the long-run. This pattern is true for each educational level, namely for university, high school, and college completion….’”
Noting that the quality of child care available during the period under study was very uneven, the paper did not include quality measures in the analyses. Even so, Montpetit “concludes that universal child care policies for children 0-4 can generate substantial social returns. And he concludes that increased availability of child care is particularly important to these returns.”