Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Monday that Japan’s low birth rate and aging population threaten the functioning of Japanese society, promising to tackle the problem through a new government agency.
“Tackling the question of childhood policies and the education of children” is a project “which cannot wait and cannot be postponed”, declared the conservative leader during a general policy speech before Parliament.
“Due to the rapid decline in the birth rate, the annual number of births is estimated to have fallen below 800,000 last year,” he added.
For this reason, Japan is “at the limit of the inability to continue to function as a society”, also noted the Prime Minister.
Kishida says his policy — which includes the launch of a new ‘Child and Family Agency’ next April — aims to ensure the ‘viability’ and ‘inclusiveness’ of the world’s third-largest economy .
The Japanese Prime Minister added that he wanted to eventually double spending on programs related to children. “We need to build a social economy that puts children first,” he said.
Many industrialized countries are seeing declines in their birth rates, but the trend is particularly pronounced in Japan, which is experiencing population decline and has the second highest percentage of people aged 65 and over in the world behind Monaco, the data shows. of the World Bank.
Japan, which has a population of 125 million, devotes a large part of its resources to the growing number of elderly people.
Birth rates are falling, including among the neighbors of the archipelago, including China, where the population even fell in 2022 according to data published last week, a first in six decades.