SYNOPSIS
Singapore’s declining birth rate need not lead to economic downfall but is an opportunity to further develop the skills and potential of its people. Immigration is necessary to supplement the numbers, and greater consideration should be given to granting citizenship to those from Southeast Asia, to help strengthen the country’s links and identity with the region.
COMMENTARY
The news that Singapore’s total fertility rate (TFR) last year plunged to a record low 0.87 per cent has triggered a wave of doomsaying. Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong called it an existential issue and wondered whether, if the trend continues, the country would still be around in 50 years.
There are not many issues which threaten Singapore’s survival in such stark terms – water security and climate change being two other examples.
It is right therefore to highlight the urgency and importance of the fertility problem, even though it is by now a familiar one that Singapore has been grappling with for decades.
This is the oft-repeated doomsday scenario: A fertility rate of less than 2.1 per cent means that the population is not reproducing itself. If nothing is done, the number of people here will start to decline at some point. With fewer people in the workforce, the economy will suffer because there will not be enough workers and less economic activity with fewer people buying and spending their money.
As if this was not bad enough, there is worse: Because fewer babies are born every year, the proportion of young people in the country will decline relative to the total. An ever-larger proportion of older people will need to be supported by an ever-shrinking younger population, straining the country’s resources even further during a time of reduced economic growth.
Therefore, the utmost effort must be made to increase the birth rate, and to supplement the numbers with increased immigration.
This has been the dominant thinking with every prime minister including Lee Kuan Yew, but every one of them failed to make any headway on the issue, with the TFR declining from 1.82 in 1980 to 0.87 in 2025.
In fact, Lee himself said he had given up solving it, in an interview for the book One Man’s View of the World in 2012, which I worked on: “If I had to identify one issue that threatens Singapore’s survival, it would be this one. I cannot solve the problem and I have given up. I have given up the job to another generation of leaders. Hopefully, they or their successors will eventually find a way out”.
In the book he also wrote that he did not think it could be solved by giving parents more financial incentives or government support.
He said that if he were still in charge, he would offer a baby bonus worth two years of the average wage of Singaporeans then (in 2012), not because it would work to raise the birth rate but to prove that even with such a generous incentive, it would not do much.
In today’s terms, this would amount to S$144,000 (US$112,500) for every newborn. He believed that even with such a super-size incentive, which is more than ten times the baby bonus offered today, it would not work because the problem had to do with lifestyle and mindset changes.
So, is it the end of Singapore?
Re-examining the Doomsday Premise
Before pronouncing the country’s impending death, I think it is useful to re-examine the premises of the original narrative.
History is a good starting point. Does the past support the view that a declining population always results in economic catastrophe?
In fact, it has not.
When fertility rates did fall off over a long period after the Second World War, the result was not economic decline but rapid growth and technological innovation.
In other words, the exact opposite of what has been feared.
