A total fertility rate of at least 1.5 is possible. As for Singapore's ageing population, its effects won't be that bad, says contrarian Laurence Lien
The Straits Times, 2 Jun 2012
BACK in 1999, when I was working at the then Ministry of Community Development, I was involved in a review of Singapore's population policy. It had been many years since the previous major review of 1987, and it was time to put population issues back on the radar again.
Our long-term projections of population numbers painted a pretty serious picture. Within a month, the Working Committee on Marriage and Procreation was created. Six months later, a Ministerial Committee followed, together with a package of initiatives that included Baby Bonus, Third Child Maternity Leave, and Paternity Leave and alternative Saturdays off for civil servants.
Twelve years later, I had a sense of deja vu reading the recent Prime Minister's Office paper on Citizen Population Scenarios. The total fertility rate (TFR) has been declining, the citizen population will shrink eventually without net immigration, and old age dependency will increase.
First, we need to be realistic: TFR will not be near replacement levels again. But I am optimistic it can be increased. The biggest suppressant of TFR is people having no children, either through singlehood or through choice. Apart from a punishing work culture among young adults, men are still marrying down, the result of educated women expecting increasingly more from a prospective spouse, and societal expectations of men earning more and not needing to be as involved on the home front.
Sociologist Anne Gaultier persuasively argues that low fertility is prevalent in countries where there is gender equity in social institutional settings, like in schools and the workplace, but where there is gender inequality in family settings. This is the case in Singapore, where younger women's opportunities in education and jobs are now equivalent to those of men. Women would feel that having children means sacrificing those prospects, and they would need to marry up to compensate, or not at all.
And yet, in the home setting, women still continue to take on many of the traditional duties of wife and mother, while also holding paid employment. No wonder so many working women choose to have fewer or no children. Gender expectations in Singapore clearly need to be discussed and changed so men take on a bigger share of duties at home.
Marital instability is also a major concern. Divorce rates among younger couples have risen. Nearly a fifth of marriages result in divorce within the first 10 years, the prime time for most to have children.
Even in intact marriages, marital tension can be a better contraceptive than artificial ones. Society needs to strengthen the marital institution. Couples need to work on their marriages more, and be open to external help in marital counselling. Children need to be welcomed into a family that is functional and loving.
How have our parenthood measures fared? I would in fact say not too badly. For those who are married and have children, it is still the norm to have two children. The average number of children born to ever-married women aged 40-49 has been rather stable - 2.12 in 1998 compared to a marginally lower 2.08 in 2010. This was even as TFR fell from 1.48 to 1.12 over the same period.
TFR measures the estimated number of children that a hypothetical cohort of females would have over their lifetime. It is a much misunderstood figure. Singapore's TFR of 1.20 in 2011 does not mean that married women have an average of 1.2 children. It means that all women, regardless of whether they are married or single, are likely to have an average of 1.2 children over their lifetime. This means having large numbers of single women or married women with no children drags down the TFR.
In fact, married women still have an average of above two children. It would thus appear that the fall in TFR is largely due to increased singlehood rates and delayed childbearing. If we can stabilise singlehood rates, childbearing ages and the number of children born to married couples, a long-run TFR of at least 1.5 is attainable.
However, there are a few critical needs to address. We have to simplify our lives and wants, and stop stressing ourselves to keep up with the Joneses. We have to show parents to be happy people. A recent study by North American psychologists showed that parents are indeed happier than non-parents. We need to reduce the pressures of our education system, embrace a broader definition of success beyond monetary attainment, and raise the status of mothers who stay at home.
A TFR of 1.5 is still far from replacement. The conventional wisdom is that economic dynamism will wane as citizens of prime working age shrink and the health-care burden increases. The knee-jerk response is then to increase immigration.
But is an ageing population so serious? I like to be a contrarian and say that its effects can be ameliorated. We can live with a gradual decline in our citizen population over the long term. While we still need foreign labour, we should slow down the intake of new naturalised citizens to below 50 per cent of new births. Otherwise, the impact on social cohesion and the building of our social identity will be too adverse.
I believe Singapore is well-equipped, compared with most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, to cope with population ageing.
First, Singapore is a high-savings country, nationally and individually, unlike many developed countries which are mired in debt. Dissaving - spending from accumulated savings - helps smooth out consumption over time. In Singapore, this includes a sustainable use of both the people's savings and our reserves.
Economist Ryan Herzog from Gonzaga University, in a March 2012 paper, showed that the effects of population ageing on growth are weakened as saving rates decline and trade openness remains high. In other words, Singapore would need to save less and consume more to sustain our growth rates.
Second, we need to maintain a high level of trade openness in all areas - goods, services and labour. We can cope with a dwindling working population if we can access the relatively cheaper labour in the countries around us, either in their home countries or in Singapore. This is especially necessary in elder and health care.
Third, we have to continue to take measures to increase labour productivity and work longer, beyond the current retirement ages. These are already policy options of choice in Singapore.
The ageing in the population of the rest of the developed world is probably of greater concern to us than our own. Many of these countries are essentially bankrupt, and have compounded their crises with both political leadership and policy failures. Whether the newly industrialised countries can fill the gap as the main drivers of global economic growth remains to be seen.
The writer is a Nominated Member of Parliament who is the chief executive of the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre. He is the Acting CEO of the Community Foundation of Singapore and chairman of the Lien Foundation.
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