Japan has been seeing how its birth collapse little by little. Now faces the result: the “problem 2025”

Japan has a great great Population challenge ahead, a demographic watchmaking pump fed by a birth rate that He has won to place in historical minimumsincreased life expectancy and a weight increasing of the elderly population. That is no novelty. However, however, Japanese economists and politicians look with increasing concern A key datethe turning point from which this aging will begin to take its toll to the country.

And it has already arrived.

The “problem 2025”. Although there is still much 2025 ahead and it is soon to know if Japanese birth will continue The descending curve of The last decadeDemographers have long suspected that this will not be an easy year. And the reason does not reside so much in fertility and mortality rates as in what it represents. 2025 will mark the point where the Japanese born during the Baby Boom of the late 40 (1947-1949) will exceed 75 years. And that means a real challenge for several reasons. In fact, in the country they have been talking about “Problem 2025”.

More than a symbol. Japan It is not the only nation that deal with the winds of demographic winter, although there they blow with more force than usual and the problem is faced from a particular perspective. From the outset, the Japanese do not perceive the elderly as most countries. For them, the usual thing is that people who have turned 65 “Genki” categorythat of healthy and active people. As I remembered The Economist A few months agomore than 50% of people between 65 and 69 years and more than a third of those of 70 to 74 are still working.

Moreover, in the population group between 65 and 74, only 3% of the Japanese require nursing care. His life is so active that the country’s gerontological association has even proposed to include that cohort in a new category, that of the “pre-estatants.” The thing changes after 75.

Crusade that barrier only work 12% of the Japanese and the percentages of the population that require care. They are the “advanced elders”, the horizon that the millions of Japanese are now born during the Baby Boom of the late 40s. And with them the whole of Japanese society does.

Why is it a problem? Because, like They have not been warning for some time Experts, that demographic turn will submit the pension system and medical care in Japan to greater pressure. And it will also do it in an aged country, accustomed to seeing how every year it is achieved A new historical minimum of birth rate and in which the population of working age It has been descending evident since the beginning of the century.

The result is what experts such as Takado Komine, of the Institute for International Policy Studies (IEPI), has called The “problem 2025”, a crisis with multiple edges and derivatives that affect society and economy.

“A sudden increase”. In A recent analysis On the phenomenon, Europa Press cites some of the fronts on which the “problem 2025” will let yourself feel. The first, he remembers citing an IPEI report, will probably be geriatric care services. The organism Consider which is “almost certain” that as of this year doctors and nurses will deal with “a sudden increase” of people who need care, which will result in “a significantly greater burden for workforce.”

And what will be the result? A foreseeable personnel and greater pressure deficit on social coverage systems. In 2018, the government has already made accounts and concluded that between 2025 and 2040 the general social security costs, including pensions, will shoot almost 60%. Everything while The weight of the population Over 65 years old does not stop increasing in the country.

The report also indicates the challenge that will be for large urban areas, where a greater volume of elderly people is concentrated. The Government has already launched to solve the problem, but the challenge is considerable and is accompanied by threats, such as giving rise to an inequality crisis among older people.

How serious is the problem? It arrives with review some figures to understand it. Last year they were born in Japan 721,000 babiesthe lowest data since the country collects statistics. Only in 1949 (in full baby boom) it is estimated that they were born 2.69 million babiesthe same ones that will now cross the 75 -year border. According to Precise The Economistthe population that exceeds that age is expected to rub the 22 million. A decade ago they were just 17.

Image | Woody Yan (UNSPLASH)

In Xataka | The Japanese demography debacle, illustrated in a graphic that speaks for itself