It is “now or never,” warned Japan’s prime minister, referring to the sharp drop in fertility in his country.
Fumio Kishida said a few weeks ago that his country is on the verge of not being able to function as a society due to the historic low birth rate: for the first time in more than a century the number of babies born in Japan fell below 800,000 on last year, according to official estimates.
In the 1970s, that number was over two million.
“Focusing attention on policies related to children and child rearing is an issue that cannot wait or be postponed,” Kishida told lawmakers, adding that it is one of the most pressing issues on the agenda this year. anus.
Although falling births is a fairly widespread phenomenon in developed countries, the problem is more serious for Japan, since life expectancy has increased in recent decades, which means that there are a growing number of older people and a number fewer and fewer workers to support them.
- “Japan was the future, but it got stuck in its past”
In fact, Japan is the country with the oldest population in the world, after little Monaco, according to data from the World Bank.
It is very difficult for any country to sustain its economy when an important part of the population retires, health services and the pension system are squeezed to the maximum, and the number of people of working age is diminishing.
Faced with this problem, Kishida announced that he will double the government’s fiscal spending for programs that promote birth rates through support for the upbringing of children.
This means that government spending would increase to about 4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
However, Japanese governments have tried to promote similar strategies before, without achieving the results they expected.
demographic time bomb
Currently, the average number of children a Japanese woman has is 1.3, one of the lowest rates in the world (South Korea has the lowest with 0.78).
There are many causes of this demographic crisis. Some of them are common in developed countries and others are typical of Japanese culture. Between them:
- gender inequalities in domestic work and childcare
- small apartments in big cities that do not give space for an extended family
- high cost and strong pressures for children to get to the best schools and universities
- rising cost of living
- increased entry of women into the labor force
- high labor demand and very little time to dedicate to parenting
- more educated young women who prefer to remain single and childless
- delaying childbearing until a later age, reducing the number of childbearing years
These are some of the reasons that come together to discourage birth rates, explains Tomas Sobotka, deputy director of the Institute for Demography in Vienna, Austria.
“In Japan, there is a punitive work culture that demands long working hours, high level of commitment and high performance from employees,” leaving little room for having children.
“It is clear that monetary support to families can only partially address the reasons behind the very low fertility in the country,” he adds.
Plus, typical financial measures, Sobotka says, aren’t enough to significantly offset the large costs of having children.
Immigration as a possible solution
Japanese governments have rejected immigration as a possible solution to chronic labor shortages and growing pressure on health and social security funding.
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, former BBC correspondent in Japan, says that “hostility towards immigration has not abated.”
Only about 3% of Japan’s population was born abroad, compared to 15% in other countries like the UK.
“In Europe and the United States, right-wing movements point to him as a shining example of racial purity and social harmony. But Japan is not as ethnically pure as those fans might think,” Wingfield-Hayes explains.
“If you want to see what happens to a country that rejects immigration as a solution to falling fertility, Japan is a good place to start,” the correspondent concludes.
Giovanni Peri, founder and director of the Center for Global Migration at the University of California and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says immigration is key to the Japanese challenge.
“A larger number of immigrants would be an effective way to counter the decline in population and labor.”
However, he warns, “I do not see governments willing to accept a large influx of immigrants necessary to allow the population to grow in Japan.”
What is happening in Japan is part of a global phenomenon that affects developed countries.
From a demographic point of view, says Peri, an increase in migration flows, especially of young people, towards advanced economies is desirable.
More migrants would prevent the size of the labor force from further shrinking and would generate more tax revenue, argues the economics professor.
Is money the solution?
The government of Japan has already made it clear that immigration is not their solution and decides to go for the money.
Prime Minister Kishida’s plan is to double public spending on programs dedicated to supporting childcare.
But some analysts such as Poh Lin Tan, a scholar at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, argue that in other Asian countries, such as Singapore, more fiscal spending to stimulate birth rates has not worked.
In that country, the government grapples with the relentless downward trend in fertility since the 1980s.
In 2001, it introduced a package of economic incentives to increase the birth rate that evolved over time.
Currently, Poh says, the package includes paid maternity leave, childcare subsidies, tax breaks and rebates, cash gifts and grants for companies implementing flexible work arrangements.
“Despite these efforts, the fertility rate continued to decline,” says the expert.
And just as it has been declining in Japan and Singapore, it is also happening in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and high-income Chinese cities like Shanghai.
“The paradox of success”
In Singapore and other Asian countries there is a kind of paradox of success.
“The inability to raise the fertility rate is not so much a testament to ineffective pronatalist policies, as to the overwhelming success of an economic and social system that heavily rewards achievement and penalizes lack of ambition,” Poh notes.
For this reason, he says that changes are also required that do not depend on monetary incentives.
A better policy, the academic argues, would be to help couples who want at least two children to achieve their fertility goals, rather than persuade the unconvinced and encourage pregnancies in younger women.
Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Khalifa University in Dubai, agrees with that.
To really increase the fertility rate, he explains, you have to support people who already intended to have one child to have two.
“The reason fertility policies haven’t worked is because they don’t address the fundamental reasons,” says Gietel-Basten, such as fragile employment, unequal gender roles in the home, discrimination in place work or the high cost of living.
In this sense, “low fertility is a symptom of other problems.”
A society stuck in the past
Improving people’s living conditions is essential to encourage birth rates, says Tomas Sobotka.
Measures such as greater labor flexibility, good quality public child care, well-paid parental leave or affordable housing.
But even all of that, he warns, is not enough to significantly raise birth rates in Japan.
What the country needs is an even deeper transformation, because “society’s gender and family norms and expectations remain rooted in the past.”
Many times, she explains, “mothers continue to be seen as the only ones responsible for caring for the family, for domestic work, for the well-being, upbringing and educational success of their children.”
According to Sobotka, a few countries in Europe achieved a sustained increase in their birth rates.
To some extent it happened in Germany, which has adopted Nordic-style family policies in the last 20 years, improving working conditions and childcare for those who decide to have children.
Estonia also had some success applying some similar measures.
At least in Europe, “countries that invest more resources in long-term family policies have, on average, higher fertility rates,” says the expert.
France, now one of the most fertile countries in Europe, Sobotka says, has done just that.
According to her experience researching the issue, what does not work is adopting pronatalist policies with a “narrow focus.”
That happens when governments set specific fertility goals centered on economic incentives for parents.
And they are less likely to work when those monetary incentives “are accompanied by restrictions on access to sexual and reproductive health or abortion,” the expert argues.
It remains to be seen if Kishida’s plan in Japan to double fiscal spending to encourage birth rates works in the short term.
If not, Japan may realize that it must transform deeper aspects of the traditional values of Japanese society and have a more flexible immigration policy. All of that, however, can take much longer.
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