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An Italian parish is offering a baby bonus payment of NZ$3400 to local parents for their third child onwards.
The initiative in the parish in Staggia Senese in Tuscany is aimed at helping local people have larger families.
But the offer comes with strings attached.
To qualify for the baby bonus, couples must already have at least two children, have been married in a church, be residents of Staggia and they must be Italian.
The bonus money is given to parents on the day of the child’s Baptism.
Since the start of the year, four families have already been granted the cash.
Parish priest Fr Stefano Bimbi hopes to extend the offer to non-Italian families soon.
The parish has appealed for more contributions.
The money would give “concrete support during difficult economic times to families with the courage to accept the gift of a child”, the priest said
The town of Staggia has just over 2000 people and the bonus is a way of incentivising residents to have larger families.
“The parish economic board voted unanimously in favour of the initiative,” Ansa reported Fr Bimbi as saying.
“We don’t have a huge amount of money but the ‘baby bonus’ will continue until funds run out,” he added.
The financial incentive follows a similar initiative by the Italian government, which promised low-income families NZ$135 a month for each child under 3 years old.
Italy’s population growth is almost zero, due to a low national birth-rate.
At the end of 2014, the number of births in the year minus the number of deaths gave a negative balance of almost 100,000, Italy’s worst level since World War One.
There were almost 12,000 fewer births in 2014 than in the previous year.
At the end of 2014, Italy’s population was 60,795,612.
Sources
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News category: World.
