is a set of government policies and cultural changes that promote parenthood and encourage women to bear more children. These generally fall into three broad categories: Financial incentives. These may include child benefits and other public transfers that help families cover the cost of children. Support for parents to combine family and work. This includes maternity-leave policies, parental-leave policies that grant (by law) leaves of absence from work to care for their children, and childcare services. Broad social change that encourages children and parenting For example, Sweden built up an extensive welfare state from the 1930s and onward, partly as a consequence of the debate following "Crisis in the Population Question", published in 1934. Today, (2017) Sweden has extensive parental leave that allows parents to share 16 months of paid leave per child, the cost divided between both employer and State. Other examples include Romania's natalist policy during the 1967–90 period and Poland's 500+ program. Encourage more women to join the workforce. Encouraging those women in the working-age population who are not working to find jobs would increase the size of the workforce. Female participation in the workforce currently (2018) lags men's in all but three countries worldwide. Among developed countries, the workforce participation gap between men and women can be especially wide. For example, currently (2018), in South Korea 59% of women work compared with 79% of men. However, even assuming that more women would want to join the workforce, increasing their participation would give these countries only a short-term increase in their workforce, because at some point a participation ceiling is reached, further increases are not possible, and the impact on GDP growth ceases. Stop the decline of men in the workforce. In the United States, the labor force participation of men has been falling since the late 1960s. The labor force participation rate is the ratio between the size of the workforce and the size of the working-age population. In 1969 the labor force participation rate of men in their prime years of 25–54 was 96% and in 2015 was under 89%. Raise the retirement age. Raising the retirement age has the effect of increasing the working-age population, but raising the retirement age requires other policy and cultural changes if it is to have any impact on the size of the workforce: Pension reform. Many retirement policies encourage early retirement. For example, in 2018 less than 10%