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Singapore - People

Singapore has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Singapore is still a viable economic powerhouse, boasting one of the highest GDPs per capita on Earth. However, the aging workforce and shrinking youth population will cause spending to decline and the economy to contract.

Since the city's foundation in 1819, Singapore's population has been polyglot and multiethnic. Chinese have been in the majority since 1830 but have themselves been divided into sometimes antagonistic segments speaking mutually unintelligible Chinese languages. The colonial society was compartmented into ethnic and linguistic groups, which were in turn associated with distinct political and economic functions. Singapore has never had a dominant culture to which immigrants could assimilate nor a common language. This was the foundation upon which the efforts of the government and ruling party to create a common Singaporean identity in the 1970s and 1980s rested.

Singapore’s population, which was 5.6 million in 2018 — including fewer than 4 million citizens — may not hit the 6 million mark by 2020. On July 1989 Singapore's 2,674,362 residents were divided into 2,043,213 Chinese (76.4 percent), 398,480 Malays (14.9 percent), 171,160 Indians (6.4 percent), and 61,511 others (2.3 percent). The population in 2008 was 4.84 million (including permanent residents, foreign workers). Ethnic groups were Chinese 74.4%, Malays 13.6%, Indians 8.9%.

Singapore is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. The annual population growth rate for 2010 was 1.8%, including resident foreigners. Singapore has a varied linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage. Malay is the national language, but Chinese, English, and Tamil also are official languages. English is the language of administration and also is widely used in the professions, businesses, and schools.

The government has mandated that English be the primary language used at all levels of the school systems, and it aims to provide at least 10 years of education for every child. In 2009, primary and secondary school students totaled about 489,484, or 9.6% of the entire population. In 2009, enrollment at public universities was 72,710 (full-time/part-time) and 80,635 at the polytechnics. The Institute of Technical Education for basic technical and commerce skills has 24,846 students. The country's literacy rate is 96.3%.

Singapore generally allows religious freedom, although religious groups are subject to government scrutiny, and some religious sects are restricted or banned. Almost all Malays are Muslim; other Singaporeans are Taoists, Buddhists, Confucianists, Christians, Hindus, or Sikhs.

The proportions of the ethnic components had remained substantially unchanged since the 1920s. Although the ethnic categories were meaningful in the Singaporean context, each subsumed much more internal variation than was suggested by the term "race." Chinese included people from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as Chinese from all the countries of Southeast Asia, including some who spoke Malay or English as their first language. The Malays included not only those from peninsular Malaya, but also immigrants or their descendants from various parts of the Indonesian archipelago, such as Sumatra, the Riau Islands south of Singapore, Java, and Sulawesi. Those people who in Indonesia were members of such distinct ethnic groups as Acehnese, Minangkabau, Buginese, Javanese, or Sundanese were in Singapore all considered "Malays." Indians comprised people stemming from anywhere in pre-1947 British India, the present states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and from Sri Lanka and Burma. Singapore's Indian "race" thus contained Tamils, Malayalis, Sikhs, Gujaratis, Punjabis, and others from the subcontinent who shared neither physical appearance, language, nor religion.

A 2017 report by the Singapore-based United Overseas Bank suggests that the country is on a similar path as Japan. In 2017, for the first time in modern Singapore's history, the percentage of people who were 65 years old or older was equal to the share of residents younger than 15. Singapore’s fertility rate, one of the world’s lowest, makes property demand highly dependent on immigration, a topic that’s as controversial there as it is in Europe and the US. With no net immigration, the labor force will start shrinking gradually around 2022. After that, GDP growth will converge with labor productivity, which is expanding by about 1.5 percent a year.

Singapore is not expected to change its immigration policy, and its population is likely to be "significantly below" 6.9 million by 2030, Josephine Teo, who is in charge of population matters in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), said in March 2018. The number of Singaporeans aged 20 to 64 is projected to peak at 2.2 million around 2020 and will decline after that, even with immigrants.