Les Llicències laborals per a mares i pares amb fills menors de tres anys. Una comparació dels sistemes vigents a Dinamarca, Finlàndia i Espanya

Abstract

Leave arrangements, flexible work schemes, and childcare services are three important elements when managing the combination of paid work and early family life. This article focuses on parenthood leave arrangements in Denmark, Finland and Spain. First parenthood leave arrangements are defined and classified. Present regulations are summarised and available data on users are presented in the three countries. While nearly all families benefit from paid parenthood leaves for 28 weeks in Denmark and 44 weeks in Finland, in Spain approximately 32% of the families with a newborn benefit from 16 paid weeks in 1995. Second, the interplay between parental leave and childcare services is discussed. The analysis is accompanied with data from the European Labour Force Survey, data on publicly-funded childcare services, and fertility data. Leave arrangements to care for children are a mixed measure of family policy and labour market policy. They illustrate the different logic that prevail in both policy fields. On the other hand they illustrate to what extend most important elements of family policy are in practice embedded in more general social policies. The relevance of studying parenthood leaves is that they allow to know more about how labour market-family-state interplay in different countries.