Taipei’s population is estimated to drop below 2.5 million by the end of this month — the only city among the nation’s six special municipalities that has more people moving out than moving in this year.
A city that is classified as a special municipality can have three deputy mayors if it has a population of more than 2.5 million people, Article 55 of the Local Government Act (地方制度法) states.
To counter the capital’s shrinking population, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) held a cross-departmental population policy committee meeting on Wednesday last week to discuss possible solutions.
According to Taipei City Government data, Taipei’s population rapidly increased in the 1980s from about 2.27 million to a record high of nearly 2.72 million in 1990. The city’s population then fell slightly, but remained steady at about 2.6 million for more than two decades.
However, it has steadily declined since 2016, dropping to about 2.48 million — below the 2.5 million threshold — in 2022, which reduced the city’s deputy mayors from three to two when Chiang took office in December of that year.
Taipei’s population rose slightly above 2.5 million last year, which experts said was mainly due to Taiwanese living abroad returning to the city to register their household registration after the national borders reopened with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While Chiang has not appointed a third deputy mayor, the city’s population has been declining again this year — to 2,502,093 by the end of last month — and is expected to fall below 2.5 million by the end of this month.
Chiang said birth and parenting-friendly policies contributed to the increase of about 1,500 newborns last year and about 775 in the first eight months of this year.
However, despite the increasing number of newborns, the number of people moving out of the city exceeded that of those moving into it, in each month of this year, with a total loss of 7,197 city residents in the first eight months of this year, city government data showed.
Experts, government officials and members of the public have pointed to Taipei’s high housing prices and high cost of living, as well as convenient public transportation to the city, as contributing to many young people preferring to live in nearby New Taipei City, Taoyuan or Keelung and commute to Taipei.
An analysis of people flow data using anonymized mobile network data, released by the Ministry of the Interior on Friday, seems to support their assumptions.
It showed that about one-quarter (25.2 percent) of the day-time population in Taipei return and stay in New Taipei City in the evening, while 2 percent return to Taoyuan and 1.4 percent return to Keelung.
Data from the global crowd-sourced database Numbeo showed that the property price-to-income ratio in Taipei last year was 28.7, higher than Singapore at 15.7 and Japan at 9.8.
Data compiled by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics showed that Taipei’s average household spending last year was about NT$1.09 million (US$34,103), the highest of the six special municipalities.
As several factors contributing to the city’s falling population have been identified, the government should not only implement short-term policies to help arrest the decline such as by providing childcare subsidies and prioritizing young couples for social housing, but also come up with policies to address long-term problems such as the housing crisis and wage stagnation, which discourages many young people from settling down and starting a family in Taipei.
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