Baby blues to continue as Hong Kong experts predict cash bonuses for births will not boost number of children

More than 760 new Hong Kong parents have applied for the government’s HK$20,000 (US$2,567) baby bonuses, a scheme introduced about a month ago as part of a bid to boost the birth rate.

The Immigration Department on Monday said it had logged 761 applications by last week, after Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu announced a range of measures designed to tackle the city’s record-low birth rate, including the one-off cash allowance for babies born over the next three years.

But a community service NGO said the cash offer was unlikely to be a major factor in decisions to have children and a social policy expert predicted the future birth rate would not see significant growth.

“It seems that new parents are not in a rush to apply for the bonus. Based on the figures shown, it does not show a rapid rebound,” said Professor Paul Yip Siu-fai, of the University of Hong Kong’s department of social work and social administration.

“A low birth rate will continue to be the trend, or even lower than 2022.”

A government bid to boost childbirth rates may not have the desired effect, experts say. Photo: Edmond So

The department said most parents had applied for the bonus alongside registration of birth.

Officials logged 2,806 registered births from October 25 to November 20, similar to numbers for each of the first nine months in 2023 and 2022.

The number of registered births also remained stagnant in the first nine months of the year.

The number of registered births fell slightly to 24,371 during the nine-month period this year, from 24,822 over the same period in 2022.

Other measures introduced to boost the birth rate included raising the tax deduction ceiling for interest on home loans or domestic rents for taxpayers who had their first child, or reserving 10 per cent subsidised flats for families with babies.

Sze Lai-shan, the deputy director of the Society for Community Organisation, said lower-income families were pleased to get the extra cash, but it could only be a short-term boost when the accumulated expenses of having a child were totted up.

“The initiatives are not strong enough to motivate people to have children,” she said. “Whether to bear a child or not, there is a lot to take into consideration.”

Sze added that information about the handouts could have been better publicised so more families, who had not yet made an application, were aware of the process.

“Some families who have just had a baby would have gone straight to apply if they were informed of the means,” she said.

Yip, whose research is focused on population health, cautioned that the effectiveness of the incentives could only be evaluated after a year.

But he said some short-term observations could be made through the figures for prenatal check-ups, which would determine whether more women had become pregnant over the next nine to 10 months.

Under the Births and Deaths Registration Ordinance, parents are required to register a birth within 42 days.

The average number of children per woman fell to just 0.9 last year from 1.3 in 2017.

About 32,000 children were born in the city last year.

Lee’s pledge to create a “firm policy direction” to encourage childbirth was reflected in his policy address last month.