Downward angle icon Downward angle icon. Cities like Tokyo and Seoul are turning to radical ideas like launching dating apps or offering money to people to reverse vasectomies to encourage higher birth rates. Yamaguchi Haruyoshi/Corbis via Getty Images Falling birth rates are a major problem for Asian countries like Japan and South Korea. Some cities are implementing radical measures like offering money to dating apps to boost birth rates. Experts BI spoke to say countries should rethink how they tackle the population crisis.
Vanessa Lee, 28, knows what kind of parent she wants to be if she ever has children.
“I want to be actively involved and make sure my children have everything they want,” said Lee, who married last year.
But these expectations have led Lee and her husband to give up on starting a family in Singapore.
“If our kids say, ‘Mom, I want you to stay home all the time,’ we can’t let them do that because we both have full-time jobs and we’re not willing to quit our jobs and become stay-at-home dads,” Lee said.
Declining birth rates are a major concern for Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea.
Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications revealed on Wednesday that Japan’s total population will decline for the 15th consecutive year in 2023.
The same is true for South Korea, whose fertility rate per woman will be 0.72 by 2023, the lowest in the world.
Faced with the double whammy of an ageing population and declining birth rates, governments around the world are sounding the alarm as they try to avoid the economic and social impacts of a demographic crisis.
But years of pro-birth policies have done little to boost birth rates, and cities like Tokyo and Seoul have begun taking extreme measures to encourage people to have more children, but demographic experts warn that such policies only address the symptoms of the problem, not the root cause.
Asian governments are eager for their citizens to have children
Earlier this month, Tokyo’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government had invested $1.28 million in a dating app aimed at Tokyo residents, which is set to be released as soon as this summer.
“We hope that this app, developed in collaboration with the government, will give peace of mind to people who have been hesitant to use conventional apps, and encourage them to take the first step in finding a partner,” a Japanese government source told the Asahi Shimbun.
The dating app has also caught the eye of billionaire Elon Musk, who has often warned about the dire consequences of declining birth rates.
“I’m pleased that the Japanese government recognizes the importance of this issue. Unless drastic measures are taken, Japan (and many other countries) will cease to exist!” Musk said in a June post on X.
Meanwhile in Seoul, the South Korean government is offering incentives of up to $730 to people looking to have a vasectomy or tubal ligation reversed.
This is in addition to the country’s wider policies to encourage childbirth, including subsidies for women to freeze their eggs and allowances for parents with newborns.
“These, in some ways, more radical proposals are perhaps a result of a sense of desperation on the part of policymakers,” Pauline Straughan, a professor of sociology at Singapore Management University, told BI. “All the traditional ideas we have don’t seem to be working, so we have to try more novel ideas to change things.”
Poh Lin Tan, a senior fellow at the Singapore Institute for Policy Studies, said there may still be value in implementing smaller-scale interventions like those in Tokyo and South Korea.
“Because social change that addresses root causes is so difficult to achieve, it may actually be rational to pursue peripheral policies and instead look for quick fixes that can make a difference in the form of low-cost interventions,” Tan said.
Countries weary of fiscally burdensome policies, such as the heavy subsidies for childcare and housing implemented by Nordic countries such as Sweden and Finland, may want to make a bigger impact through one-off transfers.
And you don’t have to be as bold as creating a dating app: Countries like Singapore and Hong Kong are offering cash bonuses to families who welcome a newborn baby.
In Singapore, parents can receive $11,000 each for their first and second child, and $13,000 for each subsequent child.
But such measures seem unappealing to young women like Ms. Li, who sees having children as a big responsibility.
Vanessa Lee (left) and her husband Jonas Hughes (right), both 28 years old, married in 2023. Vanessa Lee
Mr Lee, who has two dogs and a cat, said governments may be overestimating the effectiveness of one-off interventions to boost birth rates.
“Certainly, if more people get married, the opportunities to have children may increase slightly, but it will still be difficult unless we solve the core problem of making it easier for parents to raise children sustainably,” Lee said.
For her generation to consider having children, there needs to be a shift in society’s attitudes towards work and family, she added.
“It’s not just about having a baby. It’s about being a parent and thinking long term – how you’re going to raise your child,” she continued.
Some prospective parents are deterred by the financial costs of starting a family, something that temporary maternity benefits cannot solve.
“I don’t choose to spend part of my income on my children because it costs money,” content creator Emily Huang, 29, told BI earlier this year.
“The biggest issue on my mind right now is how to fund retirement. I feel like at my current income level, I won’t be able to retire comfortably anytime soon,” she continued.
Governments need to rethink their approach to the population crisis
Experts BI spoke to said that while these measures may be well-intentioned, they are unlikely to reverse countries’ demographic trajectories.
Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said governments that believe falling birth rates are simply because people are not having sex are addressing the “wrong problem”.
“Of course, that’s the wrong question. Most people have sex in order to have children, that’s true, but having sex is no guarantee that you’ll have children, and not having sex is not the only reason people don’t have children,” Gietel-Basten said.
“There are many policies designed to increase birth rates, but little evidence that these policies are working,” he added.
SMU’s Straughan said countries would be better off trying to unlock the potential of their ageing and aging populations.
“At some point, we have to accept that there’s going to be a growing percentage of people who want to remain single, and that’s OK,” Straughan says, “but at the same time, we have to ask, if we’re going to have more older people, what do we need to change to help them reach their full potential?”
Straughan said a growing elderly population is not necessarily a bad thing for society, and that older people can still contribute to society as volunteers after retirement.
However, governments should not completely ignore the declining birth rate.
According to Gietel Basten of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, low birth rates are a “barometer of societal challenges” and should be seen as a “sign of societal problems”.
“Just preaching or threatening young people to have more children is not the solution because people are not having children for the country, or to protect the pension system,” he said.
“We have to listen to young families and genuinely try to support them, and until that happens, just coming up with crazy ideas and imposing them from on high isn’t going to get us anywhere,” he added.
