Policy Options at the End of the Demographic Transition: Taiwan, 1993

Taiwan has successfully completed the demographic transition. By 1983 it had attained the replacement-level fertility and almost universal use of contraceptions. Using this reality as their starting point, the authors of this paper explore its implications for government policy, considering two major questions: (1) Should the government family planning program be terminated or radically restructured, now that its primary quantitive goals have been met? and (2) What should be the long-run goals for population growth in terms of TFR and is the present below-replacement level of 1.8 acceptable? The authors make various recommendations concerning family planning programs, argue against the adoption of a pronatalist policy to counter the aging effect, and endorse the new official policy of essentially accepting the present level of fertility with the goal of a rise to 2.1 in a few decades. They suggest that other methods such as investing more into education and training, providing equal labor opportunities for women, etc. need to be used to alleviate the "labor shortage" resulting from low fertility.