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Japan’s proportion of elderly people is the highest in the world.
Tokyo
cnn
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More than 10% of Japan The population is now 80 and older, the government said Monday, the latest worrying milestone in the rapidly aging country’s demographic crisis.
According to figures released by the Ministry of the Interior and Communications, the proportion of Japan’s elderly, defined as people aged 65 or older, is also at a record level: it represents 29.1% of the population, the highest rate of the world.
The Ministry released the figures on the occasion of the Day of Respect for the Elderly, a holiday in the country, which also faces a drop in birth rate and a shrinking workforce that could affect funding for pensions and health care as demand from the aging population increases.
05:58 – Source: CNN
Japan’s rural communities are disappearing. The problem is that their cities are too.
Japan the population has been in constant decline since its economic boom in the 1980s, with a fertility rate of 1.3, well below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population, in the absence of immigration. Deaths have outpaced births in Japan for more than a decade, posing a growing problem for leaders of the world’s third-largest economy.
The country also has one of the highest life expectancies in the world, contributing to the increase in the elderly population.
To address the growing labor shortage and in hopes of revitalizing a stagnant economy, the The Japanese government has encouraged Over the past decade, more seniors and stay-at-home mothers have reentered the workforce.
To some extent, that message has worked: There are now a record 9.12 million elderly workers in Japan, a number that has risen for 19 consecutive years. Workers aged 65 and over now make up more than 13% of the national workforce, the Home Office said on Monday.
Japan’s senior employment rate is among the highest among major economies, he added.
But even encouraging older workers isn’t enough to compensate. the social and economic impacts of the demographic crisis, with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warning in january that Japan is “on the verge of not being able to maintain social functions.”
He added that supporting child-rearing was the government’s “most important policy” and that solving the problem “simply cannot wait any longer.”
Nearby, Porcelain, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan They are experiencing similar crises and are struggling to encourage young people to have more children, in the face of rising costs of living and social unrest.