2023-06-02 06:36:33
Japan’s health ministry said on Friday that the country’s birth rate fell for the seventh consecutive year in 2022 to a record low, highlighting a crisis there with a shrinking population and a rapidly aging population.
The fertility rate, which is the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime, was 1.2565, compared to a previous low of 1.2601 in 2005, far below the rate of 2.07 considered necessary to maintain population stability.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made stemming the country’s declining birth rate a top priority and his government plans to allocate 3.5 trillion yen ($25 billion) annually for childcare and other measures to support parents despite high debt levels.
“The number of young people is going to start to decline dramatically in the next decade,” he said this week while visiting a day care center. “The time period until then is our last chance to reverse the decline in births,” according to Archyde.com.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated demographic challenges in Japan, as the decline in the number of marriages in the past few years contributed to the decrease in the number of births in turn, and the pandemic was one of the reasons for the increase in deaths.
The data showed that the number of newborns in Japan fell 5 percent to 770,747 last year, a new low, while the number of deaths rose 9 percent to a record 1.57 million.
Japan recorded more than 47,000 deaths last year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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