Freeing Female Workforce or Solving the lowest-low Fertility Crisis? Motivation and Conflicts of Taiwan Government’s Childcare Policy

In order to balance the impact of new social risks brought from women entering the labor market, advanced welfare states set 4 development targets of family policy after 2000: increase childcare services and develop early education, encourage women's employment and support men as caregiver, work-life balance, and promoting children's education and well-being(Daly 2010). In Taiwan's case, women’s labor force participation rate has increased by 16.29% in the past thirty years, however, this did not accompanied with increase public childcare services aside. As a lowest-low fertility country, the aim of Taiwan government to develop childcare policy is different from many countries. According to Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare in 2019, the childcare rate of infants under two is only 12.03%, far behind from the average of OECD countries which is about 30%. In the meantime, public and quasi-public childcare services’ coverage rates is only 20.55%. As domestic NGO Childcare Policy Alliance (2021) suggested, if the government try to stimulate fertility rate, then elevate public childcare coverage is the best solution. However, observing the policy development in recent years, it went to expand subsidies instead (Awaking Foundation 2018). This paper adopt a content analysis, take the most important political actor in childcare policy: the Executive Yuan as the research subject. We collect data from "our news" section under the "News and Announcements" of the Executive Yuan official website since 2008, in order to analyze Executive Yuan's formulation of new policies on childcare, development conceptual directions and official statements in response to the citizens and NGOs. By using keywords such as "public childcare", "state raising kids together with you", "infant day care", and "quasi-public childcare service" to find official information related to childcare policy. We anticipated that, after Taiwan’s fertility rate dropped to the world-lowest in 2010, the government had develop family policies for improving fertility rate, but not to support work-life balance or women in labor market. We also examine the ideology differences under different parties rule, furthermore, to discuss Taiwan as a familialism welfare state, how its existing family policy is incompatible with the aim to elevate fertility rate.