[Cet article est extrait du hors-série n°91 de Courrier international consacré à “la bombe démographique mondiale”].
For decades, the birth rate has been falling in Japan. How did we get here ? This is the question that inevitably arises when it comes to discussing the fall of the country’s population. Japan, the state where the proportion of people aged 65 and over is the highest in the world – 28% in 2018 – serves in this sense as a life-size laboratory for many observers. Quoted by Mainichi Shimbun, International Monetary Fund (IMF) economist Gee Hee Hong assures us: “Policy solutions designed in Japan may be adopted across the globe.”
Fifty years of declining birth rate
The population has been declining for fourteen years: in 2021, the natural balance (the difference between the number of births and the number of deaths) of the country was negative by 620,000 people. It’s as if a city like Lyon disappeared every year. It’s a phenomenon