President Ma Ying-jeou is urging local corporations to offer their employees baby bonuses to help boost Taiwan’s plummeting birth rate.
Taiwan’s birth rate is one of the lowest in the world. But Ma said on Friday that the number for newborns in 2014 reached a 10-year high of over 210,000. According to the president, this improving figure is due to baby bonuses, childcare allowances, and other measures that the government has implemented in recent years. President Ma said that local corporations are also encouraging their employees to have more children.
"Take Singyi Realty for example, they offer a NT$120,000 baby bonus to employees who are having a second child. It turned out that more than 110 employees qualified for the bonus; seven of them were even having their third or fourth child," Ma said. "Before the baby bonus policy, female employees sometimes felt embarrassed when they got pregnant, but now things are different. Pregnant women in the company feel more comfortable about their pregnancy. We really want corporations to not only raise salary levels but also offer baby bonuses to encourage their employees to have more babies."
Once again, that was President Ma Ying-jeou speaking on Friday.