The government's Central Policy Unit has coyly acknowledged that it is pondering how to persuade Hong Kong couples, or more accurately women, to have more children and reverse our sliding birth rate.
It will say no more. Its advice will be confidential to the government in its deliberations on population policy.
Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen is taking a personal interest. Not long ago, as chief of the population taskforce when he was still chief secretary, the father of two said, 'We have to come up with some ideas', to convince couples to have more children. It would be best for them to have three, he said.
The policy unit has an unenviable task. Advanced economies around the world face population ageing through falling birth rates and population decline without immigration.
As we also report today, the problem is baffling policy thinkers in Paris. But the 'city of light' might be able to show the 'city of lights' a thing or two about persuading women to have babies. Its fertility rate is 1.9 per woman, one of the highest in Europe but still under the 2.07 needed to avoid natural population decline. It is also about double Hong Kong's rate for women of child-bearing age.
But the Hong Kong government's advisers would baulk at the kind of family-friendly social policies the French government has adopted to tempt women to have more babies.
