1.5. What is the Potential Economic Impact of Increasing Access to Paid Child Care in West Virginia?

In West Virginia, there are 305,206 children under the age of 15 who may require child care, including 98,484 under the age of 5 and 206,722 between ages 5 and 14 [46]. There is a total of 47,624 children in paid child care (15.6 percent), including 20,436 between ages 0 and 4 (20.8 percent) and 27,188 between ages 5 and 14 (13.2 percent). Additionally, 49.5 percent of preschoolers (children ages 0 to 5) participate in some sort of nonparental care arrangement for 10 hours per week or more, compared with 53.9 percent for the U.S. average [47]. The same study points out that school – as evidenced by the COVID-19 crisis – is the most important type of child care arrangement for 93.5 percent of children ages 5 to 14.

Furthermore, the higher the parents’ income, the higher the percentage of children in regular weekly care, ranging from roughly 50 percent for household incomes below $60,000 to 79 percent for household incomes above $150,000. Factors like education attainment and the average poverty level by zip code also influence the use of regular nonparental care, with lower education and income levels equating to lower reliance on such services.

According to the findings of a study carried out by the West Virginia University Bureau of Business and Economic Research (2019), if the state increases the number of children in paid child care by 4.7 percentage points, which translates into increasing the number of children in early care and education programs by 14,300 – or from currently 50^th at 15.6 percent to 45^th at 20.3 percent, which is equal to Kentucky – it would generate a total economic impact of almost $300 million [48] and a total employment impact of 4,000 jobs. Notably, an important positive externality of providing child care to children ages 5 and younger is the long-term return on investment of such initiatives, especially as it pertains to programs that benefit low income families [49], which tend to be more advantageous than conventional economic development initiatives [50].