On October 17, the National Development Council released its latest population estimates. The predictions, although expected, are not very good.

The country’s population is expected to continue declining, moving Taiwan into a “super-aged” society next year.

While the population was 14.7 million in 1970, today it is over 23 million. This figure is expected to drop to 17.4 million in 2060.

Population decline is a serious problem that has been studied for a long time and has long-term consequences. These will come to light even if the government can turn the ship around at this late stage, which seems unlikely.

The nuances of the problem can be seen not in the population figures or the dependency ratio, which is expressed as the number of dependents per 100 people in the working population, but in the interaction of the child dependency ratio, which refers to the non-working age group. Due to the stress they put on the system and the difficulties required by the solutions, the dependency ratio for those aged 0-15 and the elderly dependency ratio, which is the non-working age group of 65 years and above.

While the total dependency ratio was 74.2 in 1970, it is predicted to be 46.3 next year and 102.2 in 2060.

That is, it is in decline but is expected to increase in the next few decades.

A distinction must be made between two dependency ratios. While the child dependency ratio was 69.08 in 1970, this ratio for old-age dependency was 5.08; that is, there were proportionately more children and fewer elderly.

The 2060 projection reverses this: The child dependency ratio will drop to 14.94, and the elderly dependency ratio will jump to 87.28.

These figures do not exist on their own and the population is not the salient point. Rather, they tell the story of a major and long-term social transformation that needs to be addressed.

Transformation will require services and institutions to address evolving needs, with an emphasis on child care and schools, providing greater resources for long-term and palliative care, implementing radical changes in priorities in healthcare delivery and hospital education, as well as implementing fundamental changes in hospital education. To relieve increasing pressure on the National Health Insurance system.

Another factor is regional differences. Data on local demographic data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs show differences in the proportion of elderly people by region: in Taipei and Keelung, as well as Chiayi, Nantou, Yunlin, Pingtung and Hualien, the age group 65 years and above is more than 20 percent. While this officially makes them “super old”, the rates in Hsinchu County, Hsinchu City, Lienchiang County, and Taoyuan were only 14.25 percent, 15.06 percent, 15.4 percent, and 15.48 percent, respectively.

Historically, governments in Asia appear to have been much more successful in encouraging couples to have children than in encouraging parenthood: China ended its one-child policy, but Chinese couples did not respond to government efforts to encourage them to procreate. In post-World War II Japan, Tokyo promoted birth control and decriminalized abortion to stem population growth, but promoting childbirth is a more challenging proposition. South Korea, which legalized abortion in the 1970s, now struggles with one of the lowest birth rates in the world.

Promoting childbirth in Taiwan is also a challenge. The problem is that demographic changes are measured in decades, not years, and the country is in the midst of a shift between two dependency ratios, national and regional. The government must address not only the fertility rate but also the social challenges of this demographic transformation.