More marriages but less babies
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More couples are saying "I do", but the trend of Singaporeans not marrying or marrying later continues to persist.
According to latest figures released by the National Population Secretariat , over 21,000 couples tied the knot last year, a slight increase of 270 couples over the previous year.
However, the general marriage rates for Singaporean males has dropped sharply - from 47.9 married males per 1,000 unmarried males in 1998 to 42.1 in 2008.
Likewise for the females - from 49 to 39.3 married females per 1,000 unmarried females in the same period.
There is also a growing trend of people not marrying or marrying later.
Over the past decade, the median age at first marriage increased from 28.3 to 29.7 for males, and from 25.7 to 27.1 years for females.
At the same time, a higher proportion of citizens aged 30 to 34 were single last year - 41 percent of males and 29 percent of females, as compared to 33 percent for males and 22 percent for females in 1998.
As for those who are married, they are conceiving less babies.
The average number of children born to citizen married females aged 30 to 39 fell from 1.74 children in 1998 to 1.58 children in 2008.
Overall, Singapore's total fertility rate of 1.28 in 2008 remained well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
At the same time, the proportion of residents aged 65 and above continued to increase from 6.8 in 1998 to 8.7 last year.
Secretariat Director Quah Ley Hoon on what the findings indicate.
" Population challenge itself is a long term challenge that the Singapore government will have to tackle, not just the government but the whole of Singapore. It is important that even in times of economic downturn, we will need to continue to encourage marriage of parenthood, encourage naturalisation and integration of new immigrants in the country as well as continue to engage our larger Singaporean family out there who are overseas Singaporeans."
All in all, Singapore's total population stands at 4.84 million in 2008, an increase of 5.5 percent over the previous year.
The growth is largely due to the increase in the number of non-residents.
Last year, there were about 80,000 new permanent residents and 21,000 new citizens.
But the secretariat declined to give a breakdown of where these new residents hail from.
--938Live
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Good!
Bring kids to Singapore to suffer meh! Grow up no jobs, jobs taken up by FTs. so good not to give birth. govt so love the foreigners, let them depend on foreigners for birth rate lo
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Originally posted by Fantagf:
Good!
Bring kids to Singapore to suffer meh! Grow up no jobs, jobs taken up by FTs. so good not to give birth. govt so love the foreigners, let them depend on foreigners for birth rate lo
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Originally posted by lianamaster:
Did someone mentioned the teengers are helping to salvage the falling statistics?
I don't read anything like that -
Originally posted by Fantagf:
I don't read anything like thatOops.. my bad.
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There will be a time when there aren't enough male citizens to serve NS. Male citizens are already very little and not to mention a significant number of them are combat unfit. The govt probably need to convert third world countries males to Singapore citizen just to serve NS.
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the gahmen must think we're stupid. times are bad. and getting worse. so of course must minimise overhead. single=more $$$. no kids=more $$$.
