I was
told by a friend that the French reproductive rate was climbing
(approaching 2.0) because of large government payments ($1,000 per
month) for a 3rd child and that Japan was studying what the French had
done. If what the French were doing was successful, every other
industrial nation would copy them.
I looked on the Internet and found the data. The French success story is not true.
The raw data is easy to interpret. There is a growing reproductive rate among French married to non-French but not among French married to other French.
Every other society on earth has seen the same phenomenon without wasting $1,000 per month. Immigrants from poor countries have high reproduction rates, like the people in the countries they left behind, and they continue those high rates for several generations in the new country. The same thing is happening in Israel among Arabs settlers and in the U.S. among recent Mexican immigrants.
No miracles in this story.
The only solution to raising reproduction rates in an industrial country is to do what Israel does: draft everyone, male and female, put them under wartime stress conditions (real in Israel and real in some UN Peacekeeping missions), and you get a high marriage and reproduction rate for your society.