Seven million is a crowd

WHEN SINGAPORE SEPARATED from Malaysia, says Tan Kong Yam, an economist at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, it was as if a brain had been deprived of its lungs and legs. An urban centre with a hinterland became a country with none, depending on Malaysia for its water supply and on the outside world for its food. As a country, it was acutely short of space. One solution has been to add some: since independence Singapore has expanded by over one-fifth, from 58,000 hectares (224.5 square miles) to nearly 72,000, by filling in the sea with imported sand. Marina Bay Sands itself, a number of massive office blocks and a golf course are all on land that used to be sea. The government expects the land area to grow by a further 8%, or 5,600 hectares, by 2030. But there is a natural limit to this growth.

Another option—to seek a hinterland elsewhere—has proved tricky. Wong Poh Kam, an economist at the National University of Singapore’s business school, points out that Johor, the Malaysian state just over the strait, could be to Singapore what southern mainland China has been to Hong Kong, offering land and labour at far lower prices. Johor and Singapore are already closely linked economically. Every day an estimated 50,000 Malaysians commute to work in Singapore from Johor Bahru, the state capital. Increasing numbers of Singaporeans and expatriates do the same, from new dwellings that offer more space at lower rents. But although relations with Malaysia have been excellent in recent years, Singapore does not want to be dependent on goodwill that has at times proved fickle.

Nearby Indonesian islands also provide room for Singaporean investment. Great hopes were once placed in Batam, for example, an island in the Riau archipelago as big as Singapore but with less than one-fifth the population, where over 400 Singaporean firms have operations. However, optimism has faded as Indonesia has seen an upsurge in labour militancy. Farther afield, in the 1990s Singapore had heady visions of replicating itself as a manufacturing power in China, on 8,000 hectares of an industrial park outside the ancient Chinese city of Suzhou. It was an unhappy experience, culminating in Singapore’s ceding control of the project to the Suzhou authorities.

The shortage of land is compounded by government policy on how it is used. One-fifth of the total, mainly secondary jungle, is reserved for the armed forces. Once space is allocated for industry, reservoirs, housing, roads and parks (including golf courses, which cover about 2% of the country), the squeeze is obvious. Yet the population, of about 5.5m now, has doubled in the past 30 years and is still expanding. In 2013 a government white paper forecast that it would increase to 5.8m-6m by 2020 and 6.5m-6.9m by 2030.

The immigration dilemma

This, however, assumed that Singapore would continue to take in large numbers of immigrants. Of these, between 15,000 and 25,000 each year would become new citizens, but the total number of foreigners coming in would be much higher. By 2030 the population of long-staying “permanent residents” would climb from about 500,000 now to around 600,000, and the number of “non-resident” foreign workers would increase from the present 1.6m to 2.3m-2.5m, covering both the low-paid migrant workers who dominate the building industry, for example, and high-paid Western “expats”.

These projections have caused alarm. Already, probably more than half the people living in Singapore were not born there. That proportion seems likely to rise. Singapore has always been an immigrant society, quick to assimilate newcomers. But that openness and tolerance has frayed as some Singaporeans have felt crowded out, and foreigners are blamed for pushing up property prices and holding down wages.

The government argued the proposed levels of immigration would be necessary to maintain even moderate growth because Singaporeans are not reproducing themselves. Last year the “total fertility rate” (TFR), a notional estimate of the number of babies a woman will have over her lifetime, was 1.25, way below the replacement rate of about 2.1. Singapore is tumbling off a demographic cliff. From 2020 the number of working-age Singaporeans will decline, and by 2030 there will be only 2.1 workers for every citizen over the age of 64, compared with 6 last year.

Within the region, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan and some mainland Chinese cities such as Shanghai have similar rates (Japan, a better-known example, is actually a little more fecund). What is exceptional about Singapore’s TFR is that it has stubbornly resisted efforts to change it, stretching over more than 30 years, in contrast to other issues on which the government has focused its attention. In that time the country’s Chinese citizens, for example, have learnt Mandarin, which hardly any of them spoke as their first language. Many children, fluent in English and Mandarin, struggle to communicate with their grandparents, who speak other regional Chinese languages.

For such a persuasive government, the failure of the campaign to raise fertility suggests a lack of will. It has tried to make parenthood more attractive by offering “baby bonuses” and improved maternity and paternity leave, but if the aversion to babies has its roots in the economic cost of parenthood, maybe it is being sustained by an ideological opposition to increasing state support for child-rearing and by the psychological effects of living on a small, increasingly crowded island. Whatever its cause, it has presented the government with one of its biggest political challenges: high immigration. This has become a source of great discontent, but there is no plan B.