Singapore - Population Policy Case Study

Background to Singapore’s Population

Population: 4,701,069

Population growth rate: 0.863%

Birth rate: 8.65 per 1000 people

Death rate: 4.8 per 1000 people

Infant mortality rate: 2.32 per 1000 live births

Life expectancy: 82.06 years

Total fertility rate: 1.1 children born per woman

Throughout the 19^th century to around the 1980s, immigration was the primary factor in population growth. After independence in 1965, Singapore's government imposed strict controls on immigration, granting temporary residence permits only to those whose labour or skills were considered essential to the economy.

Policies:

After the 1980s, migration became of minor significance, after the policies of restricted immigration were implemented, and natural increase became the main contributor to population growth. Since the mid-1960s, Singapore's government has attempted to control the country's rate of population growth with a mixture of publicity, exhortation, and material incentives and disincentives. Falling death rates, continued high birth rates, and immigration produced an annual growth rate of 4.4 percent. During this time, the crude birth rate peaked at 42.7 per 1000. Singapore was founded as a British trading colony in 1819. It joined the Malaysian Federation in 1963 but separated two years later and became independent. Since then, the size and composition of Singapore’s population has been determined by the interaction of migration and natural increase.

Beginning in 1949, family planning services, including clinical services and public education on family planning, were offered by the private Singapore Family Planning Association. By 1965 the crude birth rate was 29.5 per 1,000 and the annual rate of natural increase had been reduced to 2.5 percent, showing that the family planning services took effect.

Singapore's government saw rapid population growth as a threat to living standardsand political stability, as large numbers of children and young people threatened tooverwhelm the schools, the medical services, and the ability of the economy to generateemployment opportunities for them all.

Birth rates fell from 1957 to 1970, but then began to rise as women of the postwar baby boom reached child-bearing years. The government responded with policies intended to further reduce the birth rate:

- Abortion and voluntary sterilization were legalized in 1970

- Between 1969 and 1972, a set of policies known as "population disincentives" were instituted to raise the costs of bearing third, fourth, and subsequent children

- Civil servants received no paid maternity leave for third and subsequent children

- Maternity hospitals charged progressively higher fees for each additional birth

- Income tax deductions for all but the first two children were eliminated

- Large families received no extra consideration in public housing assignments

- Top priority in the competition for enrolment in the most desirable primary schools was given to only children and to children whose parents had been sterilized before the age of forty

- Voluntary sterilization was rewarded by seven days of paid sick leave and by priority in the allocation of such public goods as housing and education

- The policies were accompanied by publicity campaigns urging parents to "Stop at Two"and arguing that large families threatened parents' present livelihood and future security

By the 1980s, the government had become concerned with the low rate of population growth and with the relative failure of the most highly educated citizens to havechildren. The failure of female university graduates to marry and bear children, attributed in part to the apparent preference of male university graduates for less highly educated wives, was singled out by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in 1983 as a serious social problem.

In 1984, the government acted to give preferential school admission to children whosemothers were university graduates, while offering grants of S$10,000 to less educatedwomen who agreed to be sterilized after the birth of their second child. The government also established a Social Development Unit to act as matchmaker for unmarried university graduates. The policies, especially those affecting placement of children in the highly competitive Singapore schools, proved controversial and generally unpopular. In 1985, they were abandoned or modified on the grounds that they had not been effective at increasing the fecundity of educated women.

In 1986 the government decided to revamp its family planning program to reflect its identification of the low birth rate as one of the country's most serious problems. The old family planning slogan of "Stop at Two" was replaced by "Have Three or More, if You Can Afford It." A new package of incentives for large families reversed the earlier incentives for small families. It included:

- Tax rebates for third children

- Subsidies for daycare

- Priority in school enrolment for children from large families and in assignment of large families to Housing and Development Board apartments

- Extended sick leave for civil servants to look after sick children

- Up to four years' unpaid maternity leave for civil servants

- Pregnant women were to be offered increased counselling to discourage "abortions of convenience" or sterilization after the birth of one or two children

- A public relations campaign to promote the joys of marriage and parenthood

- In March 1989, the government announced a S$20,000 tax rebate for fourth children born after January 1, 1988

The mid-1986 to mid-1987 total fertility rate reached a historic low of 1.44 children per woman, far short of the replacement level of 2.1. The government reacted in October 1987 by urging Singaporeans not to "passively watch ourselves going extinct." The low birth rates reflected late marriages, and the Social Development Unit extended its matchmaking activities to those holding Advanced level (A-level) secondary educational qualifications as well as university graduates.

The population policies demonstrated the government's assumption that its citizens were responsive to monetary incentives and to administrative allocation of the government's medical, educational, and housing services.