  The availability of affordable and high-quality childcare services has become
a significant concern in recent years. Such services can facilitate the balance
between work and family life, increasing participation in the workforce and
promoting gender equality. Furthermore, childcare can also help address the
issue of decreasing fertility rates by making it more affordable for parents to
have children while maintaining their careers. This is critical, especially for
countries that are facing ultralow fertility rates like Italy. The Italian
government has included within the recovery and resilience plan financed with
Next Generations EU funds an unprecedented investment in order to increase the
supply of children's education services and make it more equitably distributed
across the country. In this article, we estimate groups of spatial areas with
similar structures in terms of coverage (availability of childcare services at
the municipality level), public expenditure rates in childcare, as well as
other socio-demographic and economic factors, such as female employment,
education, and grandparent rates. Our empirical findings confirm how Italy is
characterized by a large number of "sub-regional models" and how some of these
clusters are shared across multiple regions. We provide a preliminary attempt
to explain how such patterns are driven by socio-demographic factors and argue
that these very different conditions necessitate specific policy decisions. The
work highlights the need for regional governance of the children's educational
system.
