Faced with dismal statistics like that, the government has begun a review of population and immigration policy and says it plans new measures to encourage births by the time it publishes the results of its consultation early next year.
The message to have more babies is all the more pressing as resentment builds over an influx of foreigners who now make up more than a third of the population of 5.2 million, a factor that is eroding support for the long-ruling People's Action Party.
Social and economic engineering is nothing new in Singapore, where a firm government hand helped to steer a small island with no natural resources into one of the world's most affluent countries in a little over a generation.
But the relentless drop in the birth rate reveals the limits of that influence in what has been described as a "nanny state". Full story
