Inadequate finances, inability to buy a home and long work hours are the three major reasons for Taiwan’s low birthrate, according to a yes123 online job bank survey released yesterday.
The survey found that 63 percent of office workers aged 20 and above who responded to the poll had no children and of those, 48 percent did not plan to start a family.
In answering a multiple-choice question about why they did not want children, 66.3 percent of those respondents said they were worried about earning enough to raise a child, 42.2 percent said they could not afford to buy a home for a family and 28.9 percent said they were too busy with work.
Photo: Tyrone Siu, Reuters
Other reasons cited were dissatisfaction with the nation’s education system (23.5 percent) and concerns about serious social problems and the effect on children (21.9 percent).
The survey results show the nation’s low birthrate is related to not only low salary levels, pay freezes and long working hours, but also high housing prices, the educational environment and social order, yes123 spokesman Yang Tsung-bin (楊宗斌) said.
The survey also found that respondents believe it takes an average monthly household income of about NT$102,210 to raise a child: NT$108,435 in the six special municipalities and NT$86,971 in other cities and counties.
Based on those findings, the best way for the government to boost the birthrate would be to increase the minimum wage and call on companies to raise salaries through industrial transformation, while working to improve social welfare and social security, the company said.
The survey was conducted from March 15 to Tuesday last week among job seekers aged 20 and above through online questionnaires, with 1,236 valid samples collected, including 692 from people who are married (434 of whom have children) and 544 from single people (23 who have children).
It had a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 2.79 percentage points.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS