In reply to pasbury:
> It could also have something to do with paying the pensions of an aging and increasingly long-lived population in our own country.
Not a very logical response, for several reasons.
Problems with the viability of the pensions system (state and private have stresses for similar reasons, though they are significantly different and the private system is much more ruthless/realistic in addressing them), have various causes, but the the most fundamental one is the ratio between the average length of time spent working and the average length of time on a pension/economically inactive, e.g. at university, which has got much worse since the schemes started, so undermining their base assumptions. Increasing the total population by subsidising breeding does nothing to address this, as this new population has the same problem when it gets old, so as a solution to the work/retired ratio it has no more logic than a ponzi-scheme, and will be liable to a similar collapse.
The new population would itself require an ever growing base to support it, in any case why would a society that already has several million unemployed need a dramatic increase in population, which will only make matters worse?
Also if you are buying a pension, you are well advised to inspect the quality of the pension scheme and the record of its provider carefully. So by comparable logic, if other people's children are represented as a benefit as they are your pension scheme, it would make sense to vet the parents (or at any rate those that get child-benefit, child tax credits, maternity leave, etc, etc, etc), equally carefully to ensure that the parents have responsibly prepared for the role, have made prudent financial and other provision themselves, have a good personal record of behaviour - in other words, you should be backing winners, not losers. Of course none of this is done, nor is there any prospect of it happening, still less anything like the Chinese 1 child policy - all you need to do to get these payments is to have a child, so clearly what is being incentivised is just breeding, not good parenting.
The main original reason for payments for having children of all kinds (before politicians decided that it was a great way to buy people's votes with their own money, or even with borrowed money), was to make up for war losses, in other words to provide cannon-fodder. That is scarcely required now, yet the policy has taken on a life of its own.