The effects of
low birth rates
in Taiwan
Low birth rates will pose threat to a country’s development and subsistence. To make it clear, the extent of birth rate is closely related to how much a country is likely to succeed in developing itself. High birth rates bring about sufficient human resources and create great productivity. On the other hand, low birth rates can thus create troubles like insufficient human resources and aging society. Actually, Taiwan has been those situation. And if we fail to solve them, Taiwan’s education system, economy and the quality of our life will go down to a very terrible extent.
To begin with, low birth rates will give rise to the collapse of education systems in a few decades. Because that only few kids are born, there won’t be enough students to pay the fees that maintain every school’s operation. Thus, schools located in remote areas will collapse first and it will be difficult for children from the neighborhood to get to schools. This situation may force families from remote areas to move to relatively prosperous cities. What’s worse? That is just for the basic education. As for higher education like colleges and universities, they will face even harder situation because keeping a college or university costs much more than keeping an elementary school. With only few students register, colleges start to shut down and colleges emphasizing different features will no longer exist. In that case, the development of different academic areas will be shrink greatly.
Another crisis is that Taiwan’s economy will face a harsh time. As stated above, low birth rates lead to the collapse of schools, which would result in potential crisis of insufficient qualified labors. This would suppress the sources of highly educated labors. If the birth rate is low enough, there will be no labor for industries for the decrease on total population. For example, if there is a vacancy of 800,000 people, but the number of total human resource is only 500,000, there will be no way to make up to the gap. As a result, some small companies, even middle size companies will face difficult operation. This is extremely fatal to Taiwan, because our industry basically relies on small and medium enterprises. small and medium enterprises are very likely to be influenced by low birth rates. Unlike large enterprises, small and medium enterprises don’t have funds or resources to support them until they figure out how to deal with the shortage of human resources. Once they fail to go through the hard time and shut down, it will lead to a tremendous loss to Taiwan’s economy.
Besides, low birth rates also affect our future generation through increasing the dependency ratio. Dependency ratio is a formula admitted by international society that precisely present how many people an adult hase to raise. The dependency ratio equals to total dependency population divided by total labor population. The higher dependency ratio is, the more people an adult has to raise. According to the formula, , if birth rate keeps going down, the number of adult will fall as well, so technically each person has to raise more people. What’s more, as adults starts to retire, they would become dependency population, and this would increase people’s burden again. Some may say that the low birth rates means labor don’t have to pay for their children. That is true, but the fact is that the dependency ratio still grow.
To sum up, low birth rate is so far a very terrible phenomenon. Though people have right to decide whether having a baby, the result has a lot to do with the future development of the whole country. It may lead to the fall of education and economy systems. Additionally, people will suffer from taking care of their parents and kids alone. Low birth rate is far from only a situation, it is also a warn that indicates the country and its people’s future is likely to be difficult. Yet, it might also be an opportunity that leads to a different view of our next generation, although hard times are going to there for sure.