Key issues in the effectiveness of public financial tools to support childbearing the example of Hungary during the COVID-19 crisis

The propensity to have children, which, according to the view accepted in the literature, is a good predictor of actual childbearing, is of particular importance in countries with low fertility rates and economic prosperity. In this paper, we report the results of a representative survey of 15,700 respondents in 2021 of university students in an emerging market economy in Central Europe, mapping their intentions to have children. The PLS-SEM data analysis method was used to test our hypotheses on the relationships between social, economic, and environmental variables of childbearing. Our results confirm the dominant role of socio-cultural inclusiveness in childbearing, over socio-economic and environmental-economic factors. The novelty of our research lies in the impact analysis of family policy incentives; however, our results are consistent with those documented in the literature, namely, the primacy of socio-cultural factors in the willingness of childbearing.