According to a report prepared by Salman Haqqi for money.co.uk, which was analyzed by experts from the Polish Economic Institute (PIE), the highest costs of institutional care for children up to 2 years of age among European OECD countries are paid by the Dutch, and the lowest by the Swedes. Despite the high costs, it is in the Netherlands that most children of this age attend nurseries (over 65%), and the least in Slovakia (6.6%) and the Czech Republic (7.4%),

The report estimates what percentage of parents’ earnings in each country is the cost of caring for the kids, without taking into account the care benefits available in a given country. In the record-breaking Netherlands, this is almost 28.36%. The next place is taken by Great Britain – 23.82% of the earnings of both parents and Slovakia – 21.46%.

On the other side of the ranking are Sweden (2.62%), Iceland (4.36%) and Norway (5.51%). In Poland, caring for the kids accounts for 14.4% of parents’ earnings, which places Poland in a similar position to the Czech Republic (14.69%), Hungary (15.39%) or Italy (15.05%) and creates a more favorable situation than in Lithuania (20.14%), Latvia (19.18%) and Greece (21.24%).

The high cost of institutional care in most cases correlates with a low percentage of children covered by this care. The example of Slovakia and the Czech Republic shows that the monthly care benefits available in these countries of EUR 25.5 and EUR 20-40 per month (depending on income) cover a very small part of the monthly nursery costs, which in Slovakia are close to EUR 400 and EUR 320 in the Czech Republic.

In Poland, this disproportion between the amount of the 500+ benefits and the costs of a nursery (on average approx. PLN 1,000 per month according to the money.co.uk report) is smaller than in Poland’s neighbours, but nevertheless, this form of care is chosen by much fewer parents than in Western countries, because in Poland, nurseries are attended by less than 12% of children up to 2 years of age.

Adrian Andrzejewski order