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  • Title: Singapore's designer genes.
    Author: Cutler B.
    Journal: Consum Mark Abroad; 1987 Aug; 6(8):8-11. PubMed ID: 12341238.
    Abstract:
    The overwhelming success of the Singapore government's "Stop at Two" policy, limiting families to 2 children, turned a 1970s fear of overcrowding into a 1980s fear of surplus capacity, underachievement, and economic stagnation. To cope with the 1st signs of population decline, policy makers ironically have begun to advocate a selective undoing of previous population controls. An examination of 1983 fertility levels led to 3 startling conclusions: 1) many couples were not even maintaining replacement level fertility; 2) Chinese Singaporeans, 77% of the population, had a fertility rate of 1.5, the lowest of all; and 3) Malaysian and Indian fertility hovered between 1.9 and 2.1 during the late 1970s. Most of Singapore's miraculous economic development during the past 20 years has been the result of 1 carefully cultivated resource--a highly educated labor force. In 1983, 63% of graduate men married non-graduate women; many well-educated women do not marry and are thus not represented in the next generation. Prime Minister Lee invoked the practice of polygamy to dramatize the continued severity of the population problem. Since 1983, the Singaporean government has promoted a 2-tiered policy to encourage "graduate" marriages and "graduate" offspring. The Graduate Mother policy (unofficially known as the Designer Gene policy) offers a weighty package of incentives for educated mothers to have more children and for uneducated mothers to have fewer. But despite all the perks offered to new groups, the government is primarily concerned with the drop in fertility among Chinese Singaporeans, especially the educated Chinese.
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