Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Vietnam’s declining birth rate is the most pronounced in urban areas, while male births are even more numerous than women.
Vietnam has abandoned its policy from two longtime children while it aims to reverse its declining birth rate and to mitigate the pressure of an aging society.
All the restrictions have been deleted this week, and couples will be free to have as many children as they wish, according to the Vietnamese media.
The Minister of Health, Dao Hong Lan, said that a future of the population “threatens the sustainable economic and social development of Vietnam, as well as its national security and its long -term defense,” reported Hanoi Times.
Between 1999 and 2022, the birth rate of Vietnam was around 2.1 children per woman, the replacement rate had to prevent the population from shrinking, but the rate began to lower, said the media.
In 2024, the country’s birth rate reached a record of 1.91 children per woman.
Regional neighbors like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong all have a drop in birth rate, but their savings are more advanced than those of Vietnam.
The population of age opening from Vietnam should peak around 2040, according to the World Bank, and it aims to avoid the trap of “aging before becoming rich”.
The country’s communist government introduced the policy of two children in 1988 to ensure that it had adequate resources when it went from an economy planned to a market economy. At the time, Vietnam also overcome the effects of war decades.
The policy of the two children of Vietnam was very strictly applied to the members of the Vietnam Communist Party, according to the Associated Press, but families everywhere could lose grants and the help of the government if they had a third or a fourth child.
In addition to a decreased birth rate, Vietnam is also faced with significant imbalances in different regions and social groups, the Ministry of Health said.
The declining birth rate is the most pronounced in urban areas such as Ho Chi Minh and the capital Hanoi, where the cost of living is the highest. But there are also significant disparities in sex. Last year, the Vietnam sex-ratio at birth was 111 boys to 100 girls.
The disparity between male and female births is the most pronounced in the Delta of the Red River in northern Vietnam and in the Midlands and the Northern Mountains, according to the World Bank, and the lowest of the central highlands and the Mekong River Delta.
Vietnam prohibits doctors from telling parents the sex of their children to limit selective sexual abortions, but continuous practice, doctors communicating via coded words, according to Vietnamese media.
Left without control, the general statistics office warned that there could be an “surplus of 1.5 million men aged 15 to 49 years within 2039, reaching 2.5 million by 2059”.
In order to overthrow this trend, the Ministry of Health proposed separately from the triple of the fine for “fetal gender selection” at around $ 3,800.
