Transition to Below Replacement Fertility and Policy Response in Taiwan

Abstract

Introduction Taiwan experienced and completed demographic transition during the twentieth century. The mortality started a steady decline trend in 1920s (Barclay 1954, Wang 1986, Chen, 1979). Since then, the population grew rapidly with an accelerated speed without check of fertility decrease. The fertility level approached its peak in 1950s, reaching a TFR of 7 per woman and crude birth rates over 40 per thousand. The government initiated a national family planning program in 1965 with the intension to control the number of births. As a backing force of the family planning movement, the government promulgated in 1969 the first version of the country’s Guideline for Population Policy aiming at the goal for birth control. The crude birth rate declined to about 20 per thousand in early 1980s. However, the population growth rate remained rather high in those years, partly because of the deep-dropped low level of the crude death rate, partly owing to the increase of the number of women in reproductive ages. Allured by the seemingly growing pressure of the population growth, the government decided to reinforce the family planning program and reannounced a stronger policy in 1983 for further reduction of population growth rate, even though the TFR in Taiwan was soon reaching the belowreplacement level next year in 1984. Fertility Transition and Below Replacement Fertility in Taiwan Change in the period total fertility rate (TFR) Fertility transition, that is fertility decline from a high level to a low level, usually defined to the replacement level, occurred in Taiwan during the latter half of twentieth century. The TFR in Taiwan declined from 7.05 to 4.0 between 1951 and 1970, and continued its decline to 2.8 in 1975. Then TFR resumed its decline from 3.1 in 1976 and reached 2.0 around replacement level in 1984. After 1984, TFR stagnated around 1.75 during the period of 1986 to 1997. After around ten years’ stagnation moderately below replacement level, TFR in Taiwan resumed a significant trend of decline and touched an even lower level of 1.23 in 2003. Taiwan was enlisted into the lowest-low fertility (Kohler et al. 2002*countries in the world. TFR showed a further decline in 2004 and 2005, less than 1.2 were observed (Chang 2005). The new record of TFR, 1.1 in 2008, can be counted lower than almost all countries in the world, except two special districts of Hong Kong and Macau of China.