Hon Hai Precision Industry Co founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) wants the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to choose him as its candidate in next year’s presidential election. Gou said that if he is elected president, he would launch a new version of the 1970s “10 Major Construction Projects,” and that the first of these projects would be for the state to boost the nation’s birthrate by paying for the upkeep of children up to age six.
It is hard to say how Gou’s policy would differ from President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) November 2019 announcement that the state would help parents in raising their children from birth to six years, but some of the ideas involved are worthy of further consideration.
OVERLOOKED
Setting aside for the moment the question of where the money would come from, Gou and the Tsai administration are making the same mistake. They overlook that the main reason for the falling birthrate is not that married women are having fewer children, but that more women remain unmarried.
In 2003, each married woman on average gave birth to 1.12 children, whereas the figure for 2021 was 1.53. The average fertility rate of married women did not decline during this period, but actually grew.
At the other extreme, the figure that has fallen rapidly in tandem with the nation’s birthrate is the “marriage rate,” and this holds true across all age groups.
LINKED DATA POINTS
For example, in the 30-to-34-year-old age group, the proportion of married women plunged from nearly 62 percent in 2003 to 37 percent in 2021.
Over the past 20 years, the trend of marrying later in life and delaying childbirth has gradually evolved into involuntary lifelong non-marriage and having fewer children or none at all.
It is not as though no one has ever pointed this out. As early as 2011, the Ministry of the Interior commissioned a National Chengchi University study on Taiwan’s population policy.
The report said that “under conditions in which married women’s childbearing and fertility mode have not greatly changed, the phenomenon of falling birthrate for women of childbearing age as a whole undoubtedly stems from a major change in the women’s marriage rate.”
To put it simply, the nation’s birthrate has fallen as the marriage rate among women dropped — and this trend has turned from bad to worse.
IGNORING THE ISSUE
Also in 2011, Academia Sinica’s Recommendations Regarding Population Policies said that one of the reasons why the birthrate kept falling was that the government had not made lowering the relatively high rate of unmarried people one of its key measures.
If young people do not even get married, even if the state pays for the upkeep of all children from birth to age six, it would not have much effect.
SOLUTIONS
To solve this problem, apart from subsidizing less-well-off households that are raising children, other measures are needed, such as giving young people more employment opportunities, and improving their pay and conditions. Another good idea would be to broaden single people’s social circle, such as by arranging meet-up activities where unmarried people can get to know one another.
After all, only after finding a boyfriend or girlfriend will they have a chance to get married and have children.
Dino Wei is an information engineer in Yilan County.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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