The number of newborns each year in Taiwan has become a not-so-happy reminder that the nation’s birthrate is declining. This week, the Ministry of the Interior is to release its official population data for last year, which is likely to show that last year was yet another year of declining births. While the number of newborns traditionally increases during the Year of the Dragon compared with other years, this boom in “Dragon babies” has been shrinking in the past few decades, and this year is unlikely to be an exception.
Taiwan had the most births in the 1976 Year of the Dragon, with 425,125 newborns, government data showed. This was unprecedented, and has not been matched in subsequent Dragon years. In 1988, 342,031 Dragon babies were born. By 2000, that number fell to 305,312, before slipping to 229,481 in 2012. A glimpse of the number of newborns on New Year’s Day suggests that the number of Dragon babies might hit a new low unless the birthrate spikes unexpectedly.
The population was 23,415,008 as of November last year, 181,415 more than the same period in 2022, ministry data showed. However, the number of births fell 2.2 percent year-on-year to 123,992 during the first 11 months of last year, an average of 11,272 newborns per month. If extrapolated to the whole year, the number of births could have reached about 135,000 last year, already lower than the previous year’s 138,986, and likely a new low.
The number of births has dropped consecutively since 2015’s 213,598 newborns. Even though the government in the past few years launched measures to ease the burden of raising children, such as increasing childcare subsidies, expanding the capacity of public childcare programs and making childcare services more accessible and affordable, the decline in the birthrate, driven by a drop in the marriage rate, has become seemingly irreversible.
The CIA World Factbook estimates Taiwan’s fertility rate last year was 1.09 children per woman, the lowest worldwide, just behind South Korea with 1.11 percent, Singapore with 1.17 percent and Hong Kong at 1.23 percent. This poses a serious threat to Taiwan’s economic development and national security.
The Executive Yuan has established a special task force to tackle the declining birthrate. It has highlighted several factors that have contributed to the phenomenon in Taiwan, including a low marriage rate, late marriages, delayed childbearing, higher childcare costs, rising home prices and cost of living, as well as mothers’ career and finance considerations. However, the task force failed to explain why Taiwan experienced the lowest fertility rate in the world when many of those problems also exist in other countries. Are other factors, such as cultural values and social pressures placed on women, playing a bigger role in driving down the rate in Taiwan?
With a rapidly aging population and fewer young people who want to have children, coupled with an upcoming retirement wave that threatens to devastate the nation’s labor pension funds, no matter who wins the presidential election this year, they would have to take responsibility and urgently address this national security crisis.
Any winner aware of this critical issue and who understands that so many women in Taiwan do not want to get married and have children, would only have time for one night to celebrate after their election success, because they would know they need to get to work, and take concrete action.
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