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By Micah McCartney
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Japan and South Korea continue to pour funding into programs they hope will stabilize their falling fertility rates, with one demographer telling Newsweek he believes it's too late to avert a population crisis.
Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending, South Korea saw its fertility rate, or average number of births expected per woman in her lifetime, drop for the fourth consecutive year in 2023—from 0.78 to 0.72 births in 2022.
Japan's fertility rate declined for the eighth year, falling by 0.06 to reach 1.26. The rate at which a population needs to replace itself is considered to be 2.1.
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Meanwhile, the proportion of people aged 65 and or older is 30 percent in Japan and over 18 percent in South Korea. This trend, coupled with stubbornly low fertility rates and relatively low immigration, will drag on the productivity of Asia's second and fourth-largest economies and strain their public services and pension systems.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol stressed in May that the issue is a "national emergency." Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi called the situation "critical" and said the next few years would be "the last chance for us to possibly reverse the trend."
Newsweek reached out to the Japanese Health Ministry via a written request for comment outside office hours.
How Japan and South Korea differ
"It's too late for Japan, and it's even worse for South Korea and China," Yi Fuxian, a demographer and researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek.
Yi laid out the main societal factors behind Japan's marginally higher fertility rate compared to its neighbor's.
Yi believes the first is a heightened emphasis in Japan on traditional family values. Meanwhile, Yi pointed out South Korea ranks higher in several categories that correlate negatively with fertility, including educational attainment.
South Korea had a higher education enrollment rate of 76 percent last year compared with Japan's approximately 61 percent. Japanese women also give birth to their first child at 31 years old on average versus 33.6 in South Korea, one of the highest in the world.
Another factor inversely correlated with fertility is urban density. About half of South Korea's 51.6 million people are concentrated in the Seoul Metropolitan Area. The capital itself had a population density of around 15,560 people per square kilometer in 2022, more than twice as many as densely packed Tokyo.
Measures To Address Population Decline
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Both countries, along with East Asian neighbors China and Taiwan, which too have low fertility rates of 1.0 and 0.85, respectively, are desperately seeking to reverse the trend.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol last month called for a new ministry tasked solely with tackling the "national emergency."
The South Korean government has spent nearly $300 billion in recent years on policies to encourage child-rearing, ranging from cash subsidies to childcare services.
Last year, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida ordered his cabinet to earmark $25 billion in childcare funding over a three-year period. Kishida has said he hopes to double national childcare spending within a decade.
Local governments in both countries have also come up with initiatives such as matchmaking events.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government's latest scheme is a marriage-focused dating app. Set to launch as early as summer, participants will be required to go through a vetting process to prove they're single and willing to tie the knot.
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