NEED FOR FURTHER CHANGE

We had observed that on the basis of the recommendations of the Inter-Ministerial Population Committee, the government implemented a wide range of incentive measures in 1987 aimed at encouraging women to produce more children. This was subsequently followed by a few pronatalist measures announced by the Prime Minister at the National Day Rally held in August 2000. The effectiveness of all the measures had not been very encouraging mainly because they were formulated to loosen some of the old antinatalist measures and to introduce some limited pronatalist measures. Furthermore, the socioeconomic factors favouring small family norms had continued to exert a strong influence in prolonging the movement of low fertility below the replacement level.

In an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the above measures, one must take into account the influence of the Tiger Year and Dragon Year in the Chinese lunar calendar during the period under consideration. Viewed in terms of producing babies among the Chinese community, the Tiger Year in 1998 was an inauspicious year and the Dragon Year in 2000 an auspicious year. This resulted in some distortions in the annual movement of fertility during the period from 1997 onwards. The total fertility rate (TFR) was recorded as 1.68 in 1997 when the above measures were first implemented, and one would expect an increase to be registered the very next year. Instead, the TFR witnessed a pronounced decline of 8.3 per cent to 1.54 in the Tiger Year 1998, and remained at this level in the following year. The Dragon Year 2000 experienced a break in the fertility downtrend when the TFR rose to 1.68. Despite the introduction of some pronatalist measures in 2000, the TFR resumed its downward movement in the next few years, falling to 1.48 in 2001, 1.45 in 2002, and 1.33 in 2003.

The government became extremely concerned about the continuous decline of the low fertility below the replacement level and the attendant fall in the number of births from 46,997 in 2000 to the second low of 37,485 in 2003.