Stop Trying to Make Babies: Singapore Needs a Post-Growth Population Strategy
Singapore spends billions trying to convince its citizens to have children: the Baby Bonus scheme offers generous sums for having children, and there are increasingly progressive schemes for paternity leave, childcare subsidies, tax rebates, and priority housing.
A brave and persistent effort by the PMO’s National Population & Talent Division (hope I got the department right), but has any of it really worked?
In 2025, Singapore’s total fertility rate hit an all-time low of 0.87.
How many of us are really surprised?
We’re not the only country facing this expensive failure.
- South Korea poured over US$200 billion into pro-natalist policies over the past 2 decades, but its TFR fell to 0.72 in 2025.
- In fact, one study estimates that over 74% of its cash transfers went to births that would have happened anyway.
- The Nordic countries spend more than 3% of GDP on family support, among the most generous in the world, and their fertility rates have still been declining since 2010.
The uncomfortable truth that few policymakers want to admit is that this may turn out to be a problem we cannot solve.
A systematic review in the Population and Development Review found that financial incentives produce “modest, short-lived” effects on birth rates, while the UNFPA finds it inconclusive that child payments really stimulate birth rates. Happy to be fact-checked, but I believe that no developed country has ever returned to replacement after falling below it.
My view is that this is a civilisational pattern far beyond the control of state levers, driven by factors of education, urbanisation, female emancipation & empowerment, and trends far beyond the usual household-level micro-economic narratives. These are forces no government should want to reverse, even if it could.
Consequently, we need to rethink our population ambitions, and find ways to plan for a smaller but smarter country.
Why The Current Approach Can’t Work
Don’t get me wrong, we should absolutely support Singaporeans who want to have children, with better childcare, flexible work, affordable housing. But there is a big difference between supporting parenthood and treating population growth as a national KPI that can be engineered.
Even if you provide free childcare, subsidised housing, and even more generous leave, would Singaporeans actually have more children? Intuitively, I think many of us are willing to bet that the TFR won’t bounce back, and would likely stabilise as a best-case scenario over the next decade despite all our efforts.
To me, this trend is a modern socio-cultural reality that we have to grapple with - perhaps my sort of resigned perspective on the one-way track of rapid human development that is so inextricably linked (causally) with these population trends. This reality may be exacerbated and accelerated by such economic factors listed above (like affordability), but it’s really more than just about money at its root.
Meanwhile, the strategy of relentlessly driving population growth in Singapore creates somewhat of a vicious cycle. More people grappling over finite land pushes housing prices higher, strains childcare / healthcare, it’s simple economics. The government will tell you that matters are much worse in other developed countries (like our former DPM did in 2013) so we shouldn’t be worried, as if that was ever a good justification.
In a country with extremely limited space like Singapore, it’s pretty obvious that one doesn’t sustainably solve affordability by adding even more demand (whether natively through bumping up the TFR or through immigration), but by driving productivity to boost standards of living and to bring cost down (ref neoclassical growth theories like Solow-Swan and Romer). Unlike most large countries, we simply don’t have the privilege of letting a growing population sprawl out into the suburban areas… everywhere in Singapore is already urban.
What Are We Actually Afraid Of?
So why do we fear low birth rates?
Let’s start with the most dramatic one first. “If TFR stays below replacement forever, won’t Singapore vanish?” Maybe, but if this prediction is centuries out, can anyone really predict what happens over that time span either?
Population trends are also non-linear, so if productivity gains drive down the cost of living, if AI transforms the nature of work, or if housing becomes less scarce in a steady-state population, people may end up wanting children again, who knows!
The irony is that the best way to eventually raise the TFR might actually be to stop obsessing over it and find a way to productively live with the hand that we’re dealt. At TFR 0.97, it would take 200-300 years for the citizen population to halve. From that perspective, we have time, but what we don’t have is another decade investing taxpayer dollars into the wrong strategy.
The 2013 Population White Paper identified a few concrete concerns. If you ask me, none necessarily require more babies.
Economic Stagnation
We all know that (simplistically) GDP per capita is what matters for standards of living. Classic macro economic models (again see Solow-Swan or Romer) hinge on population growth rate as a driver of per capita economic growth, but that’s really just one piece of the puzzle.
Japan lost millions of people between 2010 and 2024, and its prime minister warned the country was “on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society” but Japan’s productivity per working-age adult actually grew. The consensus nowadays is that productivity slowdown, and not direct demographic factors, drove the “lost decades” in Japan.
Aging Burden
It’s a real concern, but having more babies doesn’t have to be the solution. A baby born today won’t enter the workforce for over 20 years, and babies are not a solution to a problem that needs solving this decade. The answer is redesigning how we support aging, not hoping the next generation arrives fast enough to take care of our older folks.
National Defense
Modern warfare is increasingly less about headcount, and the recent wars prove that point (see drones). The SAF’s gradual transformation toward a technology-intensive force is an implicit admission that the old model is obsolete, so the question isn’t how many soldiers, but how effectively we mobilise and equip the ones we have.
Three Proposals
Instead of chasing a birth rate that isn’t coming back, Singapore should design a national strategy around a smaller, more productive population.
1. A National Productivity Drive
If you can’t grow the workforce, grow what each worker produces. Singapore’s TFP averaged just 0.7% per year pre-pandemic, and much of that growth came from adding bodies, not per capita output. The good news is that TFP surged to 2.8% in 2023-24, but we should be trying to make that more sustained. Impose AI transformation mandates, double down on our comparative advantages in semiconductors, biomedical, fintech, stop propping up / tolerating low-productivity sectors, and overhaul education from primary school through fundamental curriculum redesign for AI literacy. The workforce of 2040 needs to be multiple times more productive.
2. Redesign Aging
We should stop treating aging as a burdensome cost centre. Denmark has 250+ senior co-housing communities with measurable mental health benefits and lower care costs, and Singapore’s HDBs are already quite uniquely suited to be adapted for this. In Japan, 63% of nursing homes use monitoring robots, and we should similarly be figuring out how to use technology to our aging advantage. Finally, extend productive years, restructure CPF for later careers, and radically redesign ways to let the elderly be less dependent on future generations.
3. Redefine the KPI
The TFR shouldn’t be treated as a crisis metric. Every year it drops, it comes out on the front page of ST, a politician says we need to react, and nothing changes. We’re focussing attention on a metric we cannot move while distracting from ones we can. Let’s report productivity per worker, healthy life expectancy, quality of life. Accept a steady-state citizen population of 4-5 million residents and design every policy around making it the most productive and fulfilled in the world.
Here is what I believe will happen. Singapore’s TFR will not recover, not in the next decade, and likely not in the next hundred years. We will spend the next decade announcing enhanced bonuses, expanded leave, new parenthood grants, yet the TFR will remain stubbornly low. And we will have built nothing that prepares us for the population we will actually have.
Every dollar and every year of policy attention spent chasing a birth rate that isn’t coming back is a dollar and a year not spent on the productivity infrastructure, aging systems, and national redesign we will desperately need. A smaller Singapore is not necessarily a weaker Singapore.