“But I must say, I’m not likely to give good news on the TFR front,” Gan says of 2025’s TFR, which has yet to be announced. His ministerial colleague, Siow, was even more pointed in his remarks, calling Singapore’s TFR of 0.97 in 2024 an “abysmal” result.
Ask any policymaker in a developed country what their biggest worry is, and there’s a high chance that they will point to their nation’s declining birth rate.
On Jan 26, Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong and Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow spoke about the decline in Singapore’s total fertility rate (TFR) at the Institute of Policy Studies’ Singapore Perspectives 2026 conference. Gan noted that Singapore’s TFR was boosted in 2024 because it was the Chinese Year of the Dragon.
