3 days ago
Reaction.Life
The country’s stubbornly low birth rate is not a new issue, but the stark message delivered this week by Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, hammered home just how high the stakes are. In a country where adult incontinence pads outsell babies’ nappies, it’s “now or never”, he added, to fix Japan’s demographic crisis. Japan is recording fewer births than ever before, with an estimated 800,000 last year, compared to two million in the 1970s. About 3% of Japan’s population is foreign-born, compared to 15% in the UK. Rather than conceptualising improving the birth rate as a way to fix Japan’s economic woes, perhaps policymakers should approach it the other way round: tackle Japan’s sluggish economy and the birth rate may well start to fix itself.
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