(Part 6)
The case of Japan presents an even bleaker picture of a country that is grappling with the problem of population decline. In fact, as reported by Reuters, the richest man in the world and now a close economic adviser of US President-elect Donald Trump —Elon Musk — recently provoked public anger when he tweeted that Japan would eventually cease to exist without a higher birthrate.
He actually said the obvious: “At risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss to the world.” The truth hurts but it should serve as a warning to other countries that are still toying with birth or population control policies for the usual shallow reason of fighting poverty. There are a myriad of ways to fight poverty other than controlling the number of babies being born.
It is, of course, an exaggeration to say that Japan will cease to exist. The real problem has to do with the profound social dislocations that are occurring as a result of the decline to a lower population level. What are the facts about this population decline? As reported by Leo Lewis in The Financial Times, the native population of Japan is falling at a rate of nearly 100 people an hour, despite desperate efforts of the government to raise the fertility rate. The number of Japanese nationals dropped by the most since comparable records began in 1950 — a fall of 837,000 — in the 12 months to October 2023. That decline represented a daily drop of 2,293 people or about 96 per hour. Japan’s overall population in 2023 was 124.3 million, down 595,000 from the previous year, when adjusted for rising levels of migrant workers, overseas students, and foreign permanent residents.
The latest data reinforced the image of an inverted pyramid used to represent the age distribution of the Japanese population. The number of babies born in 2023 was 758,632, a record low and down 5.1% from the year before. The number of under-15s in Japan is at a record low of 11.5% of the overall population, while the number of over-65 is at a record high of 29.1%.
Another alarm signal that Filipinos should take seriously is the disappearance of the family unit — the greatest source of human happiness in our culture. In Japan, families are becoming smaller and the population of unmarried elderly people is ballooning. Forecasts noted that Japan’s average household consisted of 2.21 people in 2020 and was on track to below two in 2033 as living alone increasingly became the norm. This trend is sadly correlated with the high rate of suicide among these “loners.”
This bleak outlook facing the Japanese population presents an opportunity for countries like the Philippines with a still young and growing population. Already, there are manpower recruiting companies in the Philippines being actively approached by hospitals, homes for the aged, hotels and other hospitality enterprises who want to employ Filipino workers in Japan. These Japanese employers are so pro-active that they are even sending instructors to organize language “boot camps” to teach Japanese to Filipino nurses and caregivers so that they can be made employable in Japan. In a reversal of previous policies of limiting guest workers, the Japanese Government has relaxed visa requirements for selected foreign workers. The number of foreign residents has risen to a record of nearly 3 million. A group of Tokyo-based public think tanks reported that Japan needed about four times as many foreign workers by 2040 to achieve the government’s economic growth forecasts.
If the Philippines is to be able to benefit from this trend, we must make sure that we keep our fertility rate as close as possible to the replacement level of 2.1 babies per fertile woman. This great demand for Filipino workers, not only from Japan, but the other countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore — not to mention countries in Europe — is sure to frustrate any attempt of our government to stop sending OFWs abroad. Even if we attain economic progress in the coming decades (and we will become a high-income economy by the decade of 2040 to 2050), what other countries can offer to our workers and professionals will always be many times more what they will be earning in the Philippines, even if much above subsistence. This means we have to do our best to keep our fertility rate as close as possible to the 2.1 babies per fertile woman so that we can have workers for both our needs and the needs of those countries that have committed demographic suicide.
We may be able to learn some lessons from the Japanese case so that we can avoid some of their problems related to declining fertility rate. In a paper written by Shinji Yamashige of Hitotshubashi University entitled “Population crisis and family policies in Japan,” empirical evidence was presented to support the hypothesis of economist Gunnar Myrdal as early as 1941 that the “population crisis is only the external aspect of what is really a crisis in the family as an institution.” Many modern states discarded the important basic principle that the family is the foundation of any society. Especially in Japan, the family is no longer the primary welfare unit. Responsibility for caring for the aged has been taken over by society as a whole, in violation of the sacrosanct principle of subsidiarity, i.e., that what can be accomplished by a lower unit should not be taken over by a higher body. In Japan, responsibility for medical care has been taken over by the State and the employers. The family, greatly shrunken in size and function, has been rendered incapable of carrying out many welfare activities. The State, greatly expanded in size and function, has taken over most welfare functions.
The expansion of social security had an undesired impact on Japanese families. Marriage and fertility rates entered the phase of continuing decline after 1974, just after the government’s declaration of the welfare state in 1973. The expectation of depending on children for old-age security continued to decline in the process of the expansion of social security. The development of the market economy and the expansion of social security replaced the roles of children, and the fertility rate declined. The norm of children taking care of aged parents changed drastically. More and more of the elderly started to live independently. The risk of the elderly falling into poverty became greater, particularly when the number of children became smaller.
There are at least two family welfare policies that the paper recommended to address the demographic crisis of Japan from which we can learn. The first is to expand social expenditures to support families with children in order to encourage higher levels of fertility. Such a family policy is shown to be necessary to prevent inefficiency in child-rearing under the Pay As You Go (PAYG) pension system. Under the PAYG system, one can receive the pension after retirement regardless of whether or not one has children. This means that one can “free ride” on the children of others in the sense that they can obtain a pension without paying the cost of raising children. This naturally leads to low fertility rates.
Another practical suggestion of the paper is for the Government to expand the number of daycare centers to support working mothers. There is no way an industrializing economy can prevent higher labor participation of women. This is especially true in the Philippines where women have higher levels of educational achievement than men. To avoid the precipitous decline in fertility rates, it is necessary to create circumstances in which being mothers, and parents in general, can be made more enjoyable. And most recently, as CNN reported on Dec. 6, 2024, Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day week for government employees, in its latest push to help working mothers and boost record-low fertility rates.
These policy measures may or may not be relevant to our own demographic future. An ounce of prevention, however, is better than a pound of cure. It would be wiser for us today not to listen to continuing proposals among some of our legislators to equate reproductive health with birth control. It would be wiser for us to look for ways and means to make it easier for working mothers to raise children.
(To be continued.)
Bernardo M. Villegas has a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, is professor emeritus at the University of Asia and the Pacific, and a visiting professor at the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. He was a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission.