To help mitigate the shrinking size and ageing profile of Singapore's citizen population, the government will continue to grant between 15,000 and 25,000 new citizenships each year.

This is according to the annual Population in Brief 2016 report released on Sept. 27 by the National Population and Talent Division (NPTD).

As of June 2016, Singapore’s population stands at 5.61 million.

The report presented statistics that showed the pressing problem of having fewer working-age citizens to each citizen aged 65 and above in the next decade.

Going forward, the number of citizens in the working-age band of 20-64 years will decline due to an ageing population.

At the same time, the number of citizens aged 65 and above will nearly double between now and 2030.

This means that there will be fewer working-age citizens to each citizen aged 65 years and over.

This ratio is 4.7 in 2016, and will halve to 2.3 in 2030.

This trend can only be alleviated over the longer term with more citizen births and immigration.

Besides immigration, citizenships are also granted to children born overseas to Singaporean parents. Last year, such children made up just under 1,600 or about 8 percent of the new Singapore citizens.

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Top photo via William Cho Flickr

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