Key Issue #3

Every country today is atleast past stage 1. Most countries are in stages two and three, and more developed countries such as the United States are in stage four. The countries that are in stage four have successfully achieved a demographic transition, which is the change from a high crude birth rate, high crude death rate, and low natural increase rate, to a low crude birth rate, low crude death rate, a low natural increase rate, and a higher total population. Around 8000 B.C., when every country was in stage one, the agricultural revolution began to take its role in human life. People were settling in permanent settlements to plant their crops, instead of migrating where there were wild animals to hunt. Every country has been in stage one longer than any other stage. Many countries in Africa are in stage two of the demographic transition. Their dependency ratio is extremely high because of their low percentage of adults that live through childhood. In this stage, the amount of births are extremely high and the crude death rate drops drastically compared to the crude birth rate. Countries that achieve going into stage two have had some sort of change in their economy. One example is of the United States and England, both went through an industrial revolution and a medical revolution. This changed the way that people lived either by more knowledge of their medical supplies or being smarter on how they acted towards things such as sexual intercourse. Also, their new way of manufacturing goods through their industrial revolution helped them export and import goods and services faster and cheaper than before. In stage three, a country's crude birth rate will descrease while the death is also decreasing. this is slowly decreasing the natural increase rate, but the population for these countries is still growing. In stage four of the demographic transition, a country's crude birth rate has met up with the crude death rate and they are about equal. This causes the natural increase rate to still decrease to zero and causes a term known as zero population growth to occur. This means that the total fertility rate declines all the way until the natural increase reaches zero. Population pyramids are used to measure out the percentage of each age group in a certain area. This age distribution may be because of a college in the main area or where the area may be located. These charts also help in labeling the sex ratio between males in females. In the United States, males outnumber females 105:100 under age 15, however; after age 40, females start to outnumber males. However, in countries like Japan, the population is shrinking instead of growing. This will become a huge problem because they will have too many elderly and not enough to work and pay for the elderly to be taken care of.

Upside Down: The Population Pyramid Problem

By Andrew Joyce

Today is Population Census Day in Japan. And while it comes around every five years in Japan, Friday’s survey could be the first to provide concrete, stark evidence of the country’s dramatic population shrinkage.
Every five years (compared with every ten in the U.S.), the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications attempts to find out — among other things — the names, ages, nationalities and employment conditions of everyone living in Japan. Any national census is a statistical goldmine, and this year’s survey will be studied closely by policymakers desperate to find a way to revive Japan’s stuttering economy in the face of unprecedented demographic shifts.

Bloomberg

Japan’s census, which begins today, could provide the first concrete evidence of the nation’s shrinking population.

In the post-war boom years, Japan had a population pyramid that looked like Mt. Fuji, with a broad spread of younger generations at its base. Japan enjoyed a 15.3% increase in population from 1945-1950 and a virile average rise of 5.7%  in every survey after that until 1980. By the time of the last census in 2005, Japan’s population increase had shriveled to just 0.7% over the five years from 2000-05 (to 127.77 million). But breaking the figures down by the year within the survey period, the population actually fell by 20,000 in the last year of the survey (2004-05), the first drop since the end of World War II.
This year’s census will likely confirm that Japan’s population has entered a long phase of decline, as the country’s glacial but remorseless demographics — a rapidly aging society and a slowing birthrate -– start to flip over into an inverted pyramid and fundamentally alter the structure of its economy.
“The 2010 census will be the first to show an actual population loss (over the five years). We’ll be able to see that we’ve gone off the cliff.” says John Mock, a visiting professor at Temple University in Japan. “One of the things to look out for is whether the rate of depopulation is speeding up,” he says.
Japan’s population is forecast to shrink to just 95.15 million by 2050, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, and coping with that demographic time bomb is one of the key challenges facing the country. It’s a challenge exacerbated by Japan’s sluggish economy, entrenched deflation and weak employment conditions, which Prof. Mock says make it difficult to see just how the country will be able to sustain a growing population of over-65s.
“It will be interesting to see (in the results of the census) what young Japanese people are doing for a living,” he says, noting that the number of people choosing ‘other’ as their category of occupation in the census has grown over the last 20 years. That suggests a lack of stable jobs, and a rise in the number of people doing low-skilled, low-paid work (known as ‘freeters’ in Japanese).
“If you have people making good solid incomes for the next 30 to 40 years, then it makes the problems easier,’ says Prof. Mock.  “But if you have young people working in convenience stores, then their ability to carry the load is much weaker.”