Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je awarded at least one local couple a cash prize of $1,753 on Monday for agreeing to marry by the end of the year, as part of a Taiwanese government campaign to boost the nation’s flagging birth rate, the Taipei Times reported on Tuesday.
Ko said he “wishes all lovers get married and live happily ever after” on March 14, while presiding over a lottery prize award ceremony at Taipei City Hall.
The event was scheduled to coincide with a locally observed holiday known as “White Day,” which is “a Japanese observance related to Valentine’s Day,” according to the Taipei Times.
The newspaper on Tuesday detailed the marriage scheme promoted by Taipei municipal leaders one day earlier, writing:
The cash lottery program is for couples married this year who both must be Taipei residents to qualify. Ten cash prizes of NT$50,000 [USD $1,753] each [are to be drawn] every month, five cash prizes of NT$100,000 [USD $3,506] each are to be drawn every season and 10 cash prizes of NT$200,000 [USD $7,012] are to be drawn this year.
The government of Taipei, which is the national capital of Taiwan, chose to offer government-backed incentives for marriage as a way to combat Taiwan’s troubling birth rate. Taipei Mayor Ko told reporters Taiwan’s national marriage rate for 2021 was the lowest figure recorded in the past 50 years.
“The nation registered about 114,000 marriages last year, including about 11,000 couples in Taipei,” he said.
Ko further revealed, “Only about 2 percent of births in Taiwan occurred outside of marriage, and most couples only have children after they marry, so the city government wants to encourage young people to marry as the first step to solving the low birthrate.”
The Taipei Times paraphrased Ko’s explanation “that the low birthrate is not caused by young married couples unwilling to have children, but rather by young people unwilling to get married.”
“In the past 25 years, the percentage of single residents aged 40 or older rose from 12 percent to 35 percent and now about one-third of the city’s residents aged 40 or older are single,” Taipei’s mayor told reporters.
Taiwan’s population shrank for the first time in modern history in 2020, Taiwan’s Interior Ministry announced in January 2021.
“Births last year [in 2020] plunged to 165,000, down seven percent from 2019. Deaths also overtook births for the first time, pushing the island’s overall population down 0.2 percent to 23.56 million,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported at the time.
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