(Feb 6): Singapore has been put on notice. The city state has long wrestled with how to lift the birthrate. But despite an array of incentives, couples aren’t showing much interest in larger families, or having any at all.
The challenge is shared by most successful nations. Ultra-low fertility is a byproduct of rapid development and elevated living standards. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China all have rates of fertility well below 2.1, the level at which demographers say a society reproduces itself.
Leaders are far from comfortable with the trend. Singapore is still crunching the numbers for 2025, though they are unlikely to improve much from the prior year. “I am not likely to give good news,” Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong told a conference last week. His interviewer joked that Singaporeans sometimes show more interest in acquiring pets than bringing bundles of joy into the world. Another minister at the same event called the fertility profile abysmal.
Singapore had hoped for a boost in 2024. Instead, the rate, which measures the average number of kids a woman has in her childbearing years, was stuck just below 1.0. The figure has been retreating for decades; when the country became independent 60 years ago, it was around 4.5. In the absence of a meaningful boost, the low level raises profound questions about the role of immigration, robotics and artificial intelligence. The country’s residents are also getting older; the government has warned that the republic will soon be a “super-aged” society.
Unlike Japan, South Korea and China, Singapore strives to attract the workers it needs — especially in industries it considers strategic such as technology, engineering and finance. In important ways, the city state is better placed than peers to navigate the hurdles. Yet there are limits: Since an electoral setback in 2011, the ruling party has emphasised that topping up the population won’t come at the expense of jobs for citizens.
Should governments just give up? Even if measures like increased paternity leave, baby bonuses, and a raft of tax incentives fail to move the fertility needle to a significant degree, that doesn’t mean they are bad policy. And it’s possible that families could again start to expand in a marked way. It’s not a lifetime ago that officials fretted about an overcrowded planet.
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Just don’t expect miracles. “Financial approaches to low fertility do not account for the powerful shift in values that has driven the move to smaller families,” Jennifer D Sciubba, Michael S Teitelbaum and Jay Winter wrote in their new book, Toxic Demography: Ideology and the Politics of Population. Values could transform “but because of the long-lasting momentum of demographic change, countries in which such counter shifts might occur after their populations were already declining would continue to register negative growth for several decades.”
In short, shoring up languishing fertility requires extreme patience.
That doesn’t mean these Asian economic stars have taken an irrevocable turn for the worse. By many metrics, they deserve praise. Gross domestic product is high and, when measured per capita in the case of Singapore, stratospheric. Each ascended to prominence in the post-World War II era characterised by falling trade barriers and capital mobility. But pre-eminence in exports didn’t by itself generate demographic challenges. Family planning was vital to national security as well as finances. Countries had to thrive, not just survive.
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If governance was geared towards keeping a lid on headcount, the opposite is now true. But it isn’t being pursued with the same vigour: Some countries strongly promoted sterilisation and, in the case of China, which enforced a one-child policy, additional kids led difficult lives. (They were often denied registration cards essential for education, healthcare and the ability to move in search of better employment opportunities.) Now China is so keen for families to get larger it’s even taxing condoms. Restrictions are gone but the problem remains.
It’s one thing to galvanise residents around the need to lift fertility. Dire predictions aren’t the solution. One South Korean minister warned in 2023 that the country risked extinction. Reports on China’s economic slowdown are now accompanied by grim-framed updates on its shrinking population. By this measure, the big news of 2025 wasn’t US tariffs or the record trade surplus, but the steepest annual drop in population since the Mao Zedong era. This retreat has been a long time in the making.
It’s not just about redirecting state actions. Women want careers, children cost a lot, housing is expensive and men are still not doing anywhere near their fair share at home. (A paper last year by Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin urged men to be dependable dads, rather than duds.)
Singapore is right that fertility news isn’t likely to be encouraging. But we didn’t suddenly arrive at this moment. Solutions won’t come overnight, if they ever will.
Uploaded by Tham Yek Lee
