A recent Japanese study showed declining birth rates may lead to “extinction” in 1,000 years. Japan’s population is made up of 16.6 million children aged up to 14, which is declining at the rate of one per 100 seconds. There will be no children left within a millennium, academics from Sendai University have said. Hiroshi Yoshida, an economics professor at Tohoku University pinpointed the root of the trend to 1975 when, he told AFP, “Japan’s fertility rate fell below two.”
Yoshida said that this is an urgent matter, as another study showed Japan’s population shrinking to just a third of the current 127.7 million within the next century. Japan’s life expectancy, one of the highest in the world, will continue to rise from 86.39 years for women and 79.64 years for men in 2010 to 90.93 for women and 84.19 for men in 2060.
The elderly constitutes more than 20% of Japan’s population. Some companies are considering direct commercial opportunities to the seniors market.
