Posted on 12/22/2004 11:36:50 AM PST by nickcarraway
Japan’s government is expected to adopt a plan that includes increased paid leave to boost falling birth rate and improve family life.
Tokyo (AsiaNews/Agencies) – The Japanese government is increasingly concerned the country’s plummeting birth rate will, on the long run, spell social and economic disaster. To counter it, it plans to insist workers take longer leaves, this according to leaked information reported in the daily Yomiuri. The set of measures the Ministry is expected to take has been dubbed ‘Angel Plan’.
Although the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has refused any comment, officials are worried about the effects of a rapidly aging population.
In the last financial year, the figure for the average number of children born to a Japanese woman during her lifetime fell to just 1.29, down from 1.32 in 2002 and 1.50 in 1994. This is well below the level of 2.08 needed to replenish the country's population.
“It is a very complicated problem,” said Manabu Yoshida, a spokesman for the ministry, but “it is also a question of whether a man and a woman want to have children or not."
The Ministry’s new five-year Angel Plan is an updated version of a similar scheme that had as its main tenet an increase in child-care facilities; this time however it is attempting something more fundamental. It wants companies to provide child-care leave for all staff, reduce by 10 per cent the number of working hours of those who put in 60 hours or more per week, and insist workers take at least 55 per cent of the paid leave they are entitled to every year.
While such improvements merely need an injection of funds, the requirement that employees use their paid holidays is likely to require a radical adjustment in the Japanese mindset.
For many social scientists, one aspect of the problem lies in the fact that men tend to spend a lot of time at work and little at home whilst women are encouraged to leave work after their first child. Another is strictly economic. “Having babies is easy,” according to Makoto Watanabe, a lecturer at Hokkaido University, “but raising and educating them is very expensive . . . It's all about costs.”
“The government,” Mr Watanabe insists, “has to ease the [tax] burden on parents”.
Health ministry figures show that 22.8 million of Japan's 127.1 million people are aged 65 or older. If that trend is not reversed, the country will lose 20 per cent of its current population by 2050.
This doesn't work in Europe.
Here's a novel concept, maybe having less kids is a good thing and will actually REDUCE the world's population!!!!
Why do you want to reduce the world's population. Countries like Japan, and most of the countries in Europe are on the verge of collapse because their population is declining. And by the way, a declining population is an economic disaster.
Without sounding like too much of a liberal pinko environmentalist, there is only so much to go around. Eventually, we are going to start running out of natural resources.
Not sure about Europe and Japan, but we're running out of room in the USA!!!
So it goes to those who out bred us like Hispanics and Muslims.
They may have more numbers, but we have more ingenuity. : )
BUMP
There are 9 161 923 km2 of land area in the 50 United States, and a population of 293 027 571. That's a population density of 32 people per square kilometer, or 0.13 people per acre.
Even if we crammed everyone into the 19% arable land area, that's still only 0.68 people per acre.
For comparison, Hong Kong has a population density of 6 771 persons per km2.
We're hardly running out of room.
That's becoming a problem here in the USA, as well - people have been reticent to use their time off for fear of being seen as less than indispensable.
,,, would you say that quite often suburbs and towns seem to be vacated for newer ones instead of renovating houses in those established places?
Maybe there's a pioneer spirit in me, but there are now three houses within sight of mine. To me, that's running out of room!!! LOL
Without a doubt, yes.
Yes I would and I think it's a shame. Although liberals get much of the credit for actually doing it, I think it is completely within the conservative mindset to work on urban renewal. Many of the homes in centers of towns are much more beautiful than what can be found in suburbia. They just need a little tlc.
And we aren't running out of room here. And sure, there's only so much to go around, but every baby is born with two hands and one mouth, and will hopefully contribute more than he's taking. Look at most major commodity prices in the past 25 years or so, and I'm sure that after adjusting for inflation, most if not all would be lower. Agriculture is always becoming more productive, and even oil reserves are higher today than they were previously.
Watch your southern border, I could slide in any time.
,,, go for it. If I was in the US I'd be into it.
I would be too, if I had the finances.
I respectfully disagree. The position your adopting is one taken by Paul Ehrlich (from Stanford). Julian Simon took the opposite position. Every bet Ehrlich ever made he lost.
The fact is resources are always expanding, in ways we can't even imagine. For human beings to advance, population has to increase.
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