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The proportion of elderly people in Japan is the highest in the world.
Tokyo
CNN
—
More than 10%. Japanese The population is now aged 80 or over, the government said on Monday, the latest worrying milestone in the country’s rapidly graying demographic crisis.
According to data released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the proportion of Japanese elderly aged 65 and over is also at a record high, accounting for 29.1% of the population – the highest proportion in the world.
Ministry released numbers on the occasion of Respect for the Elderly Day, a national holiday in a country that also faces a sharply declining birth rate and a shrinking workforce that could impact pension and health care funding as demand from an aging population surges.
05:58 – Source: CNN
Japan’s rural communities are dying out. The problem is that even its cities
Japanese the population continues to decline since its economic boom in the 1980s with a birth rate of 1.3—well below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population without immigration. Deaths have outnumbered births in Japan for more than a decade, a growing concern for leaders of the world’s third-largest economy.
The country also has one of the highest life expectancies in the world, contributing to an aging population.
To cope with a growing labor shortage and in the hope of reviving a stagnant economy, The Japanese government encouraged more seniors and stay-at-home mothers to re-enter the workforce in the past decade.
To some extent, this messaging has worked: Japan now has a record 9.12 million older workers, a number that has been growing 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 employment rate for older people is among the highest among major economies, he added.
But even encouraging older workers to settle is not enough social and economic impacts on the demographic crisis with Prime Minister Fumi Kishida warning in January that Japan is “on the verge of not being able to maintain social functions”.
He added that supporting children’s education is “the most important policy of the government” and solving the problem “simply cannot wait any longer”.
near, China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan they are experiencing similar crises and are trying to encourage young people to have more children in the face of rising living costs and social discontent.
