Currently, according to our knowledge from textbooks and what we have heard from adults, we gathered that Singapore's low birth rate issues are most likely to be caused by a few factors.
The factors are better education level among the younger generations, economical development of Singapore, changing perceptions and beliefs held by the new families and increasing cost of raising a child.
As we all know, most women cannot conceive babies after they reach the age of 50, those who marry later or delay having children are left with fewer years to have babies. There are fewer marriages as more people choose to remain single nowadays, there will be fewer families and birth rates will fall. Increasingly, people in developed countries like Singapore prefer to have smaller families. This is partly due to the increasing number of working women who find it difficult to balance work and family and hence choose to have fewer children. As such, low birth rate in Singapore will be inevitable.
We have learnt in Geography lessons that combined low birth rate and low death rate in developed countries will result in low population growth. As time goes by, the number of ‘senior citizens’ will increase disproportionally and it will eventually lead to an aging population. This means that we will not only have more elderly to take care of but also relatively lesser working population adults. The money used by the government to ‘take care’ the senior citizens will have to be derived from taxes resulting in swelling tax burden on the working adults.
However, Singapore government has come up with many incentives to motivate more mothers to give birth!
One of the incentives is to reward newborns with 'baby bonus'.
The following monetary incentives can be found on the website.
https://www.babybonus.gov.sg/bbss/html/faq.html
Source:Textbook
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