From the Associated Press via Canada's Globe and Mail, January 16:
A growing number of countries are confronting the dual challenges of population decline and aging, as younger generations opt to have fewer children and advances in health care extend life expectancy.
China said Friday that its population fell for the third straight year in 2024, falling by almost 1.4 million to 1.408 billion. Elsewhere in Asia, Japan’s population has been falling for 15 years, while South Korea’s growth turned negative in 2021. In Italy, the number of births has fallen below 400,000 for the first time since the 19th century.
The population has peaked in 63 countries and territories, about half in Europe, the United Nations says. The UN projects another 48 will hit their peak over the next 30 years.
Globally, the population of 8.2 billion people is still growing, with the UN projecting it will reach 10.3 billion in roughly 60 years and then start to decline.
For many countries with shrinking populations, the slow-moving but hard-to-reverse trend has prompted governments to offer financial incentives to try to encourage people to have children to help support growing numbers of elders.
The Japanese government’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, called the demographic situation critical last year, saying that the next six years will be “the last chance for us to possibly reverse the trend.”
The population of Japan peaked in 2008 at 128 million people and has fallen to 125 million since then. The number of births hit a record low of 730,000 in 2023.
Surveys show that younger Japanese are increasingly reluctant to marry or have children, discouraged by bleak job prospects, a cost of living that is rising at a faster pace than salaries and a corporate culture difficult for women and working mothers.
Japan’s population is projected to fall to 87 million people by 2070, when four out of every 10 people will be 65 years of age or older.
One segment of the population is still growing: an 11 per cent increase in foreign residents helped push their population above 3 million for the first time in 2023, making up nearly 3 per cent of the total.
China is growing older, a trend that could sap economic growth and challenge the government’s capacity to provide for a larger elderly population with fewer workers.
Some see opportunity. An “elderly university’ in Beijing, the Chinese capital, has enrolled 150 students in dance, singing, yoga and modelling classes. The business has yet to break even but founder Liu Xiuqin believes in the market’s future, given the value that retirees born in the 1960s place on quality of life and health compared to earlier generations.
The government is raising the retirement age over the next 15 years to 63 from 60 years old for men; to 55 from 50 for women in factory and other blue-collar jobs and to 58 from 55 for women in white-collar work.
China ceded its position as the most populated country to India in 2023, after the population began to fall in 2022. Women are having fewer babies despite the easing of China’s one-child policy to allow up to three children.
The population of 1.4 billion people – still more than 10 times that of Japan – is projected to fall to 1.3 billion by 2050....
....MUCH MORE
That projection is probably optimistic and from 2050 to 2100 the decline in the numbers approaches the incomprehensible. Literally. From July 1, 2024:
How Serious Is China's Demographic Doom? Almost Beyond Comprehension
