Curious if anyone has dug into the numbers (clearly the author of the linked article did not). Is the further decline in growth rate reported driven by less births or more deaths?
There are way less marriages to Chinese spouses and SEA spouses and therefore less children. Also little permanent immigration. Guessing it’s related to immigration anyway but it’s also continuing the trend of very low birth rates.
http://m.focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201807290008.aspx
This year or next year could be peak population.
There are already more deaths than births !
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That is fake news. SEA spouses have always been growing, which is really bad since it’s borderline human trafficking.
I was always curious about how they found the SEA brides? Do they go there and ask anyone they see on the street to marry them? Are there organized order-a-bride organizations? Because it doesn’t look natural at all.
Perhaps total is down?
Still would like to see proof that SEA marriages with Taiwanese are up over the last few years.
From this I guess there are actually less marriages to foreign brides as well . Only 30,000 marriages in the last ten years to Vietnamese.
There are more caregivers and labourers than ever.
Number of marriages has dropped quickly and marrying later.
As very few single people have kids here…Which is a pity for a lot of women.
Why is it a pity?
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Because they would enjoy being mothers I think. I know some very nice and kind single ladies here . Not being married means they are missing out that aspect.
Where I am from originally there are a lot of single mothers and they can always get married or just have partners or stay single. Most women would probably like to have kids.
Ah… well certainly, you’d be right. That’s refreshing, considering the perception shifts in motherhood in the West.
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The West is a varied place.
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this is not true. It decreased rapidly between 2004–2006 from 18103 to 6950. The bottom was 4784 in 2012, and after that it is slightly increasing every year. 8749 in 2018.
Along with just around 2500 Chinese spouses a year now which is massively down from years ago.
So the number of foreign marriages per year is quite possibly dropping overall.
Interesting reading the headline you linked ‘migrant brides now more integrated’. Do Taiwanese have any appetite for a multicultural society with this immigration? Seems like it’s about tolerating rather than celebrating cultures that come here…
It’s a common theme, trying to integrate immigrants. I wouldn’t read too much into the statement.
There are too many people in the world anyway. It’s time for populations to start dropping.
If they want more marriages, the government should encourage change in the culture surrounding marriage and childbirth. I’m not sure how they would do that as changing culture is hard, but getting married and starting a family here involves huge expenses. The expenses aren’t strictly necessary, but are deeply rooted in the culture and unlikely to change. There’s also the fact that a lot of dating couples live with their parents until marriage, so the start-up costs are higher. I’ve known men who wanted to get married, but just didn’t think they had enough in savings yet. I’m not sure how much that effects low-income people. It’s relatively easy to get married legally. Culture changes take a long time.
I’ve heard it said that women delay marriage because they fear losing their freedom to do anything with their lives. I’ve not known many unmarried women who doing much anyway. Some, but not many. Many it’s subconscious.
What the gov’t might do is to enforce laws to prevent discrimination against women who are or might become pregnant. It shouldn’t be, and may not be, permitted for women to be asked if they are or may get married or pregnant in the near future.
I feel like we’re just at the peak of the wave, here. Looking at the booms in the West years ago (that brought on some of us, here), the climate was different, opportunities were better, etc. so people were more prone to have children. I think when it becomes dire to increase birth rates, governments will appropriately turn on their backs to make sure it happens. I mean, look at Japan right now (not necessarily acting akin to my hyperbole, but they’re showing awareness)
Japan is at the forefront of sex with robots and marrying blowup dolls. Hardly can call that an upswing.
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Bottom line is that you need society as a whole to support child bearing and most importantly child rearing. When you have in place teh necessary conditions, like parental leave, child care facilities, cultural flexibility for women´s work and man´s care of kids, then society ahs a healthy growth and is prosperous. However, as in japan´s case, when women are penalized for trying to go back to teh work force after having kids or excluded from certain professions on a fossilized mentality not an economic need (see Medicine school scandal) then you have asituation that becomes unsustainable. Women do not wnat to marry not only not to lose independence but most importantly, because they will become isolated from economic growth. Married people do not want to have children as their economic burden is unsustainable. It all goes back to a fossilized elite that sees economic growth as a zero sum game and hence won´t allow further participation of many of society´s memebers into the economy.
Taiwan is somewhere in between. If nmore child care facilities, work flexibility and better conditions overall for child rearing were enacted, then maybe we would stand a chance. However, the old women as servnats mentality, still frsh with the treatment of inmmigrants as such, will slow down economy even more.
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Oh boo-hoo. Taiwan can have as many immigrants as it wants.
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Not really. There are in place cultural and economic constraints, the biggest is the balance between dirt floor costs and maximum profits and political support. If more workers are imported at dirt low prices, say, what every laoban wants to open to China and in their minds pay peanuts, this will cause internal unrest and lose them political support. If China takes over and they are able then to import all teh workers they want for dirt cheap, then the problem would be that as it happened in China, someday the costs will go up, there will be political unrest from teh consecions like environmental costs those dirt costs imply and eventually, the whole thing will collapse because you cannot just sell based on cost. And that is one thing the laoban culture cannot understand.