Singapore Govt Creatively Battles Birth Dearth

Singapore Plays Matchmaker, Hoping to Boost Its Birth Rate

By Trish Saywell  |  Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Updated Jan. 30, 2003 12:01 am ET

SINGAPORE -- Andrew Tan, a 36-year-old lawyer, is looking for a wife. He has an unusual matchmaker helping him: the Singapore government, which is trying a novel tactic.

It's American-style Speed Dating, sponsored by the government's official matchmaking agency, the Social Development unit. The SDU assembles a group of men and women and pairs them off at tables. They chat for seven minutes until a bell rings, and then rotate on to a new mystery date. At the end of the session, participants write down who they'd like to meet again. If there are matches, they'll get a date.

"It's a good way to meet people," says Mr. Tan, who has attended seven sessions in the past eight months. "I'm looking for someone who is family-oriented, someone who is not the outgoing kind."

This tiny, Type A city-state, worried by a steep decline in population growth, is trying to get its best and brightest to mate and breed with a new generation of government-sponsored dating games, some of which it has copied from American singles groups. The SDU also organizes Zodiac Dates, in which singles try to guess each other's astrological signs. Prizes for right answers include bath gels and restaurant vouchers.

Then there are Library Dates, in which eight men and eight women are paired off and given 45 minutes to look through bookshelves, choosing books that reflect their interests. Then they write down their impressions of each other based on the books they have chosen. Over drinks and cake, everyone gathers at a roundtable discussion to present the partner to the rest of the group.

Singapore's government has been trying to socially engineer behavior for years, from its famous 1992 diktat outlawing the sale of chewing gum to cloying courtesy campaigns urging its citizens to be nice. The SDU, created in 1984, has been trying to get the otherwise-occupied overachievers of this Jamaica-sized nation together for years with everything from dance classes to self-development courses.

The task is growing more urgent because the birth rate among Singapore's four million people is falling steadily and now languishes at 1.4 children per woman. That's below the 2.1 demographers say is necessary for a population to replace itself.

Meanwhile, lower-cost Asian countries such as China are luring away the factory-floor jobs that in years past made Singapore a world-class producer of electronics and other goods. So Singapore is eager to transform itself into a mecca for knowledge-based fields such as advanced biomedical research. To make such a future sustainable, the government needs more than just a lot more warm bodies; it needs highly educated warm bodies to be fruitful and multiply.

Speed Dating is an idea swiped from a rabbi in Los Angeles who saw it as a way of keeping his flock from marrying outside the faith. It takes place at the LoveByte Cafe, situated on the lush grounds of the SDU. Jazz is playing and aromatic oils are burning.

Speed daters agree not to discuss age, work or previous relationships. "What our events try to do is help participants interface and identify human chemistry," says Soon Mee Sam, general manager of Premier Club, a private company hired by the SDU to organize social events for its members.

The SDU's 20,000 members, who must be university graduates, pay a fee to join as well as to attend SDU mixers. That's one reason local wags say the SDU really stands for "Single, Desperate, Ugly." (A separate government agency, the Social Development Service, helps non-university graduates meet.)

The SDU also offers computer matchmaking services and publishes pamphlets on marriage preparation. Hot off the SDU presses: an eight-page booklet, "When Boy Meets Girl -- The Chemistry Guide," offering tips on everything from the perfect outing (a picnic or taking the dog for a walk in Singapore's Botanic Gardens), to how to "spruce yourself up," whether you are a "natural beauty or cosmetically challenged."

The SDU declined to comment for this article but has claimed that about 1,500 of its members tie the knot each year.

The government matchmakers face some hurdles. Many married couples in Singapore complain they have no time for love because they are too focused on careers and making money. In its 2002 annual survey of 50,000 people over the age of 16, condom-maker Durex (a unit of SSL International PLC of London) ranked Singaporean lovers the least active among the 22 countries it surveyed.

Prof. Victor Goh of the National University of Singapore says his recent study of 1,000 local men and women under 40 revealed that only 25% of men wanted sex more than six times a month. That desire dropped to 10% for women. "They are just too stressed out at the end of the day," says Mr. Goh.

And some singles sniff at dating under government auspices. "It's not cool," says Karen Teo, a 29-year-old journalist who studied at an Australian university and has a British boyfriend. "You're required to participate in games and stuff. It's not interesting. It's not hip."

Her elder sister, Jenny, disagrees. She joined the SDU as a fresh university graduate at the age of 22 and met her husband at the second event she attended -- an ersatz treasure hunt on one of Singapore's small outlying islands. They got married two years later and have two children. "I would recommend SDU events," she says. "Maybe you'll find like-minded people and hit it off."

Inspired by such success stories, the SDU -- through the Premier Club -- keeps working to improve the odds, offering sexual compatibility talks and "self-enhancement" and make-up workshops to "encourage people to enhance their natural attributes and make themselves more attractive to the opposite sex," Ms. Sam explains.

Part of her current mission is to encourage partners who met and married thanks to the SDU to share their stories with others. She's even offering Tiffany watches as a reward.

There haven't been any takers. In one case, a 36-year-old woman who met a 39-year-old man at Speed Dates and got hitched was too embarrassed to share her story, despite the tantalizing prize.

"If I were 36 years old, found a husband and got married four months later," says Ms. Sam, "I'd tell the whole world about it."

Singapore Isn't Kidding When It Comes to Fostering Fertility

Government offers cash grants and public housing, but birthrates remain stubbornly low

By Jon Emont

Feb. 22, 2020 8:00 am ET

SINGAPORE—For years, this prosperous city-state has encouraged its citizens to have more children, offering cash grants for new parents, providing public housing for young couples and even passing along relationship advice.

In its latest push, the government in January expanded preschool subsidies and enhanced government support for assisted reproduction and fertility treatments.

But fertility in Singapore remains in a slump—1.14 children per woman in 2018, down from about three in 1970, making it among the world's lowest rates. Demographers say the city-state's difficulties reflect how government policies tend to have a low impact on raising fertility rates.

"Policies in general have a very disappointing effect from the policy makers' perspective," said Mikko Myrskyla, executive director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany. Once small families and childlessness become commonplace, he said, cash handouts and subsidized kindergarten tend not to change people's minds, in part because they make only a small dent in the lifetime costs of raising a child.

"We can see many youth not getting married and they think twice before having kids," said Bhavani Perina, a 41-year-old Singaporean with three children who is taking a break from her career to focus on them.

Ms. Perina said that workplace hours should be more flexible to support working parents, and that child-care-leave policies should be extended to those with older children.

Falling birthrates pose a challenge in countries around the world. They face a future with shrunken workforces and insufficient tax revenue to support expanding ranks of the elderly. Even the U.S., once considered less vulnerable because of high immigration and high birthrates among some groups, saw births in 2018 fall to their lowest levels since the 1980s.

The question of how to boost birthrates is taking on new urgency amid a global backlash against immigration. Some economists have argued in favor of expanding immigration as a quick way to boost the workforce in low-fertility societies. Instead, many such countries have grown resistant, partly because of worries that migrants will replace declining native populations.

Even Singapore's government is concerned about what it calls nativist tendencies. An opposition party's manifesto recently alleged immigration policies were "precipitating a crisis of national identity." A government spokesperson said its policy has been to take in a stable number of new citizens and permanent residents committed to making Singapore their home.

Government efforts to raise the birthrate haven't ended the problem. South Korea spent billions of dollars on low-interest home loans and cash grants to parents to encourage couples to marry and procreate, but its fertility rate has sunk to record lows. In the mid 2000s, Russian fertility rose from post-Soviet lows on the back of grants and tax breaks for parents, but it has fallen again in recent years.

In a recent email to The Wall Street Journal, Singapore's government cited increases in Denmark and Sweden in the 1980s and early 2000s as evidence that government intervention can help. It linked the uptick to state support for child care and family-friendly workplace policies. But both nations have seen their fertility rates slip. In 2018, Swedish-born mothers had fewer babies than any year since 2002 and immigrants—who tend to have more children—are contributing a rising share of births.

Singapore publicizes its policies to support parenthood on www.heybaby.sg, a government website. Benefits include higher tax rebates for more children, paid leave for parents with young children and tax benefits for working mothers whose parents look after the grandchildren. The government offers grants to companies that provide flexible work arrangements, such as letting employees telecommute.

"We must actively lean against the wind to make marriage and parenthood achievable, enjoyable and celebrated," Minister for Manpower Josephine Teo said in a speech last year.

It is a stark change from the 1970s and 1980s, when Singapore, like China, was concerned about the opposite problem: too many children. Back then, it gave preference in government housing to small families and waived certain hospital fees for parents having their fourth child who agreed to be sterilized. By the mid-1980s, birthrates had fallen dramatically.

But in 1987, a new policy encouraged Singaporeans to "have three, or more if you can afford it."

Today, Singapore's National Population and Talent Division, a government unit, says that while most young Singaporeans want to get married and have children, "they are increasingly prioritizing other goals such as furthering their education, building their careers and travel." The government said there were hopeful signs, including that "the average number of citizen births and marriages over the last five years is higher than that in the preceding five-year period."

From 2014 to 2018, an average of 33,000 citizen births were recorded each year, compared with 31,400 a year in the preceding five years. In that 10-year period, however, the fertility rate—which reflects the number of babies born relative to the number of women of fertility age—didn't change much, hovering around 1.2 births per woman.

Singapore is finding new ways to bring couples together. Deon Chan, the founder of dating agency Love Express, recently received a government grant to build an app that, she said, will use artificial intelligence to suggest romantic partners for singles who attend her events. She points to statistics that show Singaporeans staying single until later in life.

At one of Love Express's recent speed-dating events, held in a luxury hotel and advertised on a government website, a dozen men rotated between tables of women sipping mocktails, discussing careers, hobbies and whether love at first sight exists.

Jessie, a 40-year-old office administrator, said that although she would like to get married and have children, there was no forcing it. "It takes two hands to clap," she said.