Asia’s decades-old fertility fall cannot be reversed overnight

The shift from smaller families to larger ones will require patience

- DANIEL MOSS

Singapore has been put on notice.

The city-state has long wrestled with how to lift its birth rate. 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'm not likely to give good news,” Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong told a conference last week.

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.