Birth rate in Japan has never been so low

The measures of the Japanese government to the population to enable more children to create, save but not. The population there continues to be rapidly graying.

For the first time since 1899, the first year in which figures were kept, they saw so little of Japanese children were born. It reports the British newspaper The Guardian. In 2018, it is estimated that there namely only 921.000 babies to be born, again to 25,000 less than last year. On the other hand blew 1,37 million people to their last breath. A population decline of half a million people, in other words.

It is also the third year in a row that less than a million babies are born in Japan. To the population the less quickly go down was the Japanese government, however, the goal of the birthrate – the average number of children per woman – increase of 1,43 at this point, to 1.8 in april 2026. That objective seems now not to be met.

At the same time, the Japanese society rose rapidly ageing. Women an average of 87,2 years old, men love the 81,01 years, and that thanks to the habit of regular medical check-ups to undergo the free health care and low-fat Japanese diet. In 2040, more than a third of the Japanese are older than 65.

More migrants

Prime minister shinzo Abe has low birth rates and increasing ageing of the population declared a national crisis situation. The parliament approved recently a immigration law properly, which should enable hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to attract to the many vacancies to fill.

In addition to the imbalance in the labour market threatens the coming decades, and also the invoice of the free health care unaffordable. Unless a series of (obviously unpopular) tax increases are pushed through.

Extra nurseries

And unless more children are born, of course. To that aim, promised the government measures that young couples to encourage more children to get. So there would be additional childcare centres to recover. For each child by april 2020 place in a nursery. Whether that will succeed is the question. Despite the declining birth rate, the waiting lists in the subsidized child care last year for the third year in a row become longer.