Yes you are. 
Guy
I know how to read. I assure you I understand what âdoing nothingâ means.
Guy
Now thereâs a point with which I do not disagree!
Guy
Sounds like you are just nitpicking. I could say the same about the traffic. They are doing nothing to improve the situation. They might be spending lots of money and resources on covering half the country in green paint but the traffic doesnt improve.
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Iâm starting to think some people really canât read between the lines or recognize idioms. This behavior has been occurring a lot on this site lately. Is this part of the spectrum?
I assure you I am aware of how to do that.
Now ask yourself: how does asserting that a government is doing NOTHING square up with the massive number of variables concerning population policy and outcomes? How can you be confident that the current multiple measures are doing NOTHING without comparing a society with the same variables not governed with those measures?
We are all in agreement that the current measures are inadequate, and that is the basis of discussion in this thread which now has 2600+ posts. This discussion is not advanced by posting factually false claims and then blithely moving the goalposts when those claims are challenged and specifics are carefully provided.
Guy
OK this post is pretty funny. 
Guy
All evidence to the contrary
Did you miss the bit about green paint?
Itâs clear youâre quite unserious about this. Thatâs fine, thatâs your call. Duly noted.
Guy
Also, being stubborn and having no sense of humor, pretty sure those are on there
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Yeah, stop being so stubborn, guys. This is another big topic on this site. And donât forget to put on your idiom helmets, okay? 
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No it doesnât. South Koreaâs crude birth rate is under 5%. Taiwanâs was 5.83% in 2023. South Koreaâs fertility rate is also slightly lower than Taiwan. In 2022, South Koreaâs TFR was 0.78 while Taiwanâs was 0.87. Both indicators are extremely low, but Taiwanâs are slightly higher despite South Koreaâs impressive policies.
South Korea can fund more impressive policies because it has a higher tax-to-GDP ratio than Taiwan: 19%. Taiwanâs is just 14.7%.
Throwing rent money at students while families still canât afford homes is an embarrassing joke.
Families receive rent subsidies too. Also, most students rely on their families to pay their rent. Subsidies for student rents reduce the cost of having children and might encourage people to have kids if they are thinking about total cost (which I doubt many do).
South Korea has built over 1.1 million in the past decade. Taiwan needs to catch up, fast.
This is impressive but I canât find a source for it. A quick internet check suggests that Seoul has proportionally provided about as many social housing units as Taipei has.
Taiwan is building 54,134 more units now. 33,285 more units are under contract through the public tender process. 58,373 more are being planned for a total of 179,573 units.
Taiwan also has a very ambitious rental management plan where licensed property management companies take over rental properties and tenants get subsidies. More than 84,000 families are already renting through this program, which is expanding quickly now after initial slow progress in the early years (around 2018).
Korea does seem to have invested more resources, and I understand they are talking about a dedicated ministry. That might be a good idea in Taiwanâprograms dispersed across different government departments are often not as efficient as they could be.
But despite greater investment, South Koreaâs main achievement has been to stop the falling CBR and TFR and record a tiny increase in 2024, the first time in nine years.
Perhaps Taiwan should set the modest goal of equaling that achievement first.
I also note that South Korea and Taiwan both seem to share the same problem: seriously decliing rates of marriage. And like Korea, only a small percentage of births are out of wedlock in Taiwan. Fewer marriages directly correlates to fewer children in East Asian societies.
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I am not patting anyone on the back. I am first just establishing that the government is doing quite a few things to address the situation.
I completely agree that the government needs to do more to produce results.
Here are some things that I think the government could do but would be expensive and politically very difficult.
- Dial back on pro-family education and teach children that single women can have children if they so choose without the world ending.
- Build a high-quality system of comprehensive subsidized or free daycare in neighborhoods and near businesses so that women can work and have children without being burdened with all the responsibility for childcare. But where will the qualified and licensed workers come from? Young people consistently indicate that care work is there least-preferred career choice.
- Let migrant workers stay and encourage them to bring or have families. But this would be highly unpopular with the public because migrant workers come from SEA countries. The Taiwanese are not ready for the idea that they might stay even though that is slowly becoming a reality.
- Ban Buxibans. The public daycare system can provide this service and we can lessen school pressure. But what do we do about the wealthy who will just hire tutors as has happened in China?
All of these ideas would require major social and cultural change. The reality is that the Taiwanese government is always inclined to adopt slow, cautious, and incremental change unless absolutely forced to do otherwise. And the Taiwanese public is very conservative in the sense that they do not take kindly to small changes let alone radical ones like these.
The end result is that while I strongly suspect that the NDC and Taiwanese experts understand what solutions would work, the government and the politicians consistently choose the easy way out: hand out subsidies.
I have read that the same thing has happened in Europe. Northern European countries have invested in daycare etc. that allows women to work and have kids. They continue to have low, below-replacement total fertility rates, but much closer to 2.1 (immigration is a big help too).
But the southern European countries like Spain, Italy, and Greece stubbornly prefer to focus on subsidies. It is probably not an accident that they are very family oriented just like Taiwan. Some people suspect that these countries are trying to subsidize the traditional family back into existence. I suspect that may be the same in Taiwan. Plus, subsidies are just easier to administer and explain.
Again, I am not patting the government on the back. I am mainly trying to explain why it is that things are unlikely to change in the near future. Taiwanâs population is going to decline for the forseeable future with all kinds of implications. We will just have to adjust.
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These are excellent points. I am also very interested in why Japan is doing better than Taiwan in terms of birth and fertility rates. But Japanâs population is still declining by something like 800,000 people annually. In this respect, Japan is much more deeply in demographic decline.
I wonder if one important reason for the difference is that Japan became wealthy long before its population started to decline. Everything is so compressed in Taiwan. We just became a rich country (albeit a poor rich country) and demographic decline followed almost immediately. Japan had longer to invest and upgrade as a wealthy society not in demographic decline.
Iâm thinking out loud about this. Itâs just a idea.
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The only people who can bring change are the ones suffereing because of the lack of it.
Govt. is trying but its like asking a guy who always ride in a car to fix pedestrian problems. He cant relate to it so he will just try random stuff he thinks âmightâ work.
Same for population decline. Most people making policies are well off and can afford children so they dont understand why others arent thinking about having children so they just throw ideas around.
Or maybe they know and they just dont care that much.
I believe subsidised rentals are fairly widely available although that may depend on the county. It seems they are doing a reasonable job and these are 5x better schemes than before. Taxpaying foreigners can feck off course if they think that can see any benefits from this.
Checked the limit to get subsidies and you did need to be on quite a low income to qualify.
Thereâs also this.