With Taiwan’s birthrate falling to an all-time low last year, the National Development Council (NDC) yesterday conceded that the government’s birthrate projections in a report published in 2024 were “too optimistic.”
“The previous estimates were too optimistic, resulting in a relatively large discrepancy with the actual figures,” NDC Minister Yeh Chun-hsien (葉俊顯) said during a question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei.
A revised version of the council’s Population Projections for the Republic of China (Taiwan): 2024-2070 is due to be published in August, Yeh said.
Photo: CNA
“This time, the hypothetical scenarios and statistical model will be revised to assume the worst-case scenario for population conditions,” he said.
The Ministry of the Interior on Tuesday last week reported that the number of births fell to a record monthly low of 6,523 last month.
Births last year fell for the 10th straight year to a record low of 107,812, or about 18,000 lower than the council’s worst-case projections of 126,000.
In the 2024 population report, the council used the nation’s 2023 total fertility rate (TFR) of 0.87 as a basis to project three scenarios for future fertility — a high scenario of 1.3, a medium scenario of 1.0 and a low scenario of 0.8.
TFR refers to the average number of babies a woman will have during her lifetime. A 2.1 or higher rate is needed for a population to replace itself without migration.
Based on those varying scenarios, the council projected that Taiwan’s population would fall from a high of 23.6 million in 2019 to between 14.4 million and 15.8 million by 2070, or 61.4 percent to 67.7 percent of the 2024 population.
Taiwan’s crude birthrate last year stood at 4.62 per 1,000 people.
While the government has yet to announce the official TFR, Newsweek has estimated that is likely to be about 0.72, making Taiwan’s birthrate the lowest in the world.
The central government has had few solutions, as annual births have plummeted from more than 193,000 in 2017 to 165,244 in 2020 and 107,812 in 2025, Ministry of the Interior data show.
Lawmakers urged Yeh to study the example of South Korea, where the total fertility rate rose from a low of 0.72 in 2023 to 0.8 last year, driven by an increase in marriages and pro-natal policies.
Yeh said there was a “serious” trend of people not marrying or having children, stemming from factors including anti-natal workplace policies, economic pressure and changing values among young people.
Stipends and subsidies alone would have only a “limited” impact on the birthrate, he said, citing an Academia Sinica study.
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