A new report from the General Department of Population forecasts that seven provinces in Vietnam will experience population decline in 2024, with An Giang projected to lose the most residents.

Vietnamese are marrying later and having fewer children, according to Pham Vu Hoang, deputy head of the Ministry of Health’s (MOH) General Department of Population.

The Ministry of Health has strongly refuted recent social media claims alleging that the Health Minister proposed a trial program to penalize single people.

A survey from the Việt Nam Association of Realtors showed that the country has about 400 retirement homes, with around 50 per cent of them charity centres or state-invested facilities.

The Ministry of Health (MOH) has predicted that by 2038 there will be one person aged over 60 for every five people in Vietnam.

If the gap in the number of boys and girls at birth in Vietnam continues to widen, it will severely impact people born after 2005. By 2030, of those of marriageable age, about 10 percent of men won’t find spouses.

Population aging is creating new pressure and challenges to which the population and development work needs to flexibly respond as there are only 14 years left for Vietnam to prepare for an aged society.

As Vietnamese life expectancy has increased by 30 years in the last six decades, Vietnamese need to prepare for a healthy aging period.

The average number of babies in 2023 that each Vietnamese woman had was 1.96, the lowest figure in the last 63 years. The birth rate decrease is expected to continue in the years to come.

Vietnam is working to improve its fertility rate as the country is facing the risks of an aging population as well as losing its “golden population” phase that affect the socio-economic development.

This is seen as a radical change compared to the current Population Ordinance, which called for each couple or individual to have “one to two children.”

The average fertility rate per woman of childbearing age in Ho Chi Minh City has decreased to 1.32 from last year’s 1.42, the HCM City Department of Health said on July 8.

Without timely policy adjustments and solutions to raise the birth rate, Vietnam's population will gradually decrease, hindering the country's socio-economic development.

VN is grappling with specific challenges, particularly concerning the target for 2030, which aims to sustain a steady replacement fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, while anticipating a population size of approximately 104 million.

Vietnam needs "now or never" policies "to become rich before getting old", experts say.

Vietnam continued to see a fertility rate decrease in 2023. The low birth rate will cause consequences such as a rapid aging population and labor shortage. It will also affect social security.

If the fertility rate continues to decreases, Vietnam will begin seeing minus fertility growth rate after 2054 and the total population will fall to 72 million by 2100, experts have warned.

Vietnam’s population was estimated at 100.3 million in 2023, ranking third in Southeast Asia (behind Indonesia and the Philippines) and making it the 15th largest country by population in the world, reported the General Statistics Office.

While Vietnam has achieved significant milestones in population management, successfully controlling population growth since 2006 and entering the golden population structure in 2007, there was stark regional differences in birth rates.