SINGAPORE—Sarah Wee and James Ng are the
quintessential career couple. Married only a year, the sparkly Wee
is a media executive at a large ad agency. Ng, clean-cut in a blue
button-down, is an asset manager with a property investment firm.
They own a condo, a $42,000 car and two dogs, a Maltese and a Shih
Tzu.
They have a bright future, a future that includes children—but
not just yet.
That is the quandary Singapore faces as it tries to boost its
anemic birthrate. The government, fearing that the tiny, prosperous
city-state will shrink into oblivion, has recently adopted a series
of incentives to encourage people to have not just one or two but
three or more children.
Officialdom here once rewarded parents who voluntarily
sterilized themselves. Now it’s offering three-month paid maternity
leaves, up to several thousand dollars in graduated baby bonuses
and co-savings plans, and tax breaks for nannies and grandparents
who take care of children.
Those incentives may nudge couples such as Wee and Ng. Wee, 28,
had been thinking of having one or two babies. But with the new
policy, she said, maybe she will have more.
“It seems a bit easier to have children,” she said over dinner
at a restaurant in a glittering downtown shopping mall. But, she
added, “I don’t want to quit my job and stay at home.”
Singapore’s birthrate has sunk to an all-time low of 1.25 babies
per woman. Raising it has become a national cause, as significant
as the fight against terrorism. If the birthrate continues to wane,
officials warn, the workforce will shrink. There will be fewer
people to support a growing elderly population and to sustain the
military that protects this 400-square-mile island sandwiched
between Indonesia and Malaysia. Singapore’s vaunted tiger economy
will whimper.
The government is loosening immigration rules, too. But a
premium will always be placed on native-born Singaporean citizens,
officials said.
“This is a matter of values, not of incentives,” the new prime
minister, Lee Hsien Loong, said in a recent National Day speech.
“We want people to have babies because you want them and you love
them. It’s part of a happy family life. “
“Singapore. A Great Place for Families,” declared a two-page
color spread in the Straits Times newspaper promoting the baby
perks. The paper also brimmed with articles about new measures to
encourage a “balanced family life,” including a shorter workweek
for government employees—five days instead of five and a half—and
guidelines for ending discrimination against working women who want
babies.
