Daisy Lai sends her five-year old son Wai-man off to school with a packed-lunch and a kiss.
"We'd love to have a little brother or sister for Wai-man ... but we just cannot afford it," says the Hong Kong mum, who gave up working to look after her son to leave her businessman husband as the sole breadwinner. "Education is very expensive and we can't afford a flat big enough for four. It would be impossible for us to have another."
Lai is not the only mother in this southern Chinese territory who feels her familial ambitions are being constrained by economics.
The high cost of living and a shortage of time among the city's hard-working women are severely depressing its birth rate. Last year Hong Kong had the lowest in the world, just 0.9 babies for every woman of childbearing age.
With a shrinking indigenous population -- only immigration from China last year boosted the citizenry, to 6.9 million -- Hong Kong is far from the two babies for every woman necessary to maintain its numbers.
In most developing countries in Asia, population growth is galloping along at a frightening pace. But Hong Kong is among a handful of developed economies whose sustainability is under threat from declining and aging populations.
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and Singapore all notched up below-replenishable birth rates in the past year, raising the specter of a demographic crisis as fewer working-age people support more and more elderlies.
As a result economists predict the region's economic powerhouses will soon face a productivity crunch and declining social services as welfare funds are used faster than they can be replenished by the shrinking workforce. Governments have been forced to act.
Hong Kong's leader Donald Tsang (
But Wai-man's mum Lai says a lack of tax breaks or other financial incentives means this is an unrealistic hope. "It's just words, but money is what you need to raise kids," she says.
Baby bonuses are bringing mixed results. Tsang put together a package of cash incentives to encourage more baby-making. Only 37,300 babies were born there last year, way below the 50,000 births needed to naturally replenish the population of 3.2 million.
The Australian government introduced a similar scheme last year, offering 3,000 dollar (US$2,256) "baby bonuses" to spur couples to boost the country's 20.3 million population. Nine months later it appears to be working: Australia recorded its highest annual birth rate in nine years, 1.75 babies per woman.
In Taiwan, where the birth rate is just 1.18 babies per woman, incentives have failed to increase the island's 22 million people. In the capital city of Taipei, low-income families were given NT$2,500 (US$78.6) per month for every child aged below six but the rate still fell.
In Japan, a fifth of the workforce of the world's second largest economy is over 65 and placing a strain on its already overburdened pensions schemes. Demographers predict only two working adults will be supporting one retiree by 2021, worsening to one-on-one by 2051.
Japan's population, currently at 127.69 million is expected to peak next year at 127.8 million, after the birthrate hit a record low in 2004 of 1.29 children per woman. In response, a recent study called for more jobs for the elderly, who usually begin to retire at 60 in Japan.
The government provides tax incentives for childless couples to breed and has gone on a construction spree of nursery schools to ease fears that children would be a burden to careers or lifestyles. Japanese law allows both women and men to take a full year off until their children turn one.
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