This article contains numerous factual errors. It is typical of items appearing in EastAsiaForum: wishful liberal hope trumping hard reality.
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“East
Asian countries now have the lowest fertility rates in the world”
The
World Population Review and other sources show a number of European
countries among the ten or twenty lowest fertility rate countries
including Moldova, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Cyprus, Bosnia And
Herzegovina, Spain, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, and Germany.
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While Japan’s current fertility rate is higher than those of other
societies in East Asia such as Singapore and Hong Kong, its decades
of low fertility mean that it is the most rapidly ageing population
in the region and is facing severe labour shortages.
Hong
Kong is not a country.
Japan
is facing labour shortages primarily because the economy is strong,
not because of past low fertility.
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“The
Japanese government reported that fewer babies were born in 2018 than
in any year since 1899, the first year that records were kept. Other
East Asian societies look to be on track to follow in Japan’s
footsteps.”
The
number of babies born in Japan is down because of shrinkage in the
fertile age cohort, not because of a declining fertility rate. The
Japanese fertility rate bottomed in 2005 and has been generally
increasing since then albeit with some wobble at the second decimal
place.
It’s
not just East Asian countries that are reporting the fewest babies
born since recording keeping began. Finland is just one country
outside of East Asia where this happening.
Moreover,
Nordic countries overall are experiencing declining fertility. The
lowest fertility rate Nordic country is just barely higher than
Japan.
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“There are two solutions to population decline: increase immigrant
flows or raise the birth rate.”
The
issue is not population decline but work force (aka taxpayer decline)
or in technical terms the dependency ratio.
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“If immigration is not necessarily the panacea, what is? Making it
possible for women to participate in the labour market and
simultaneously have two or more children if they wish to.”
No,
this is not a “panacea” and that is clearly demonstrated by the
Nordic example. Norway has repeatedly been held up as the best
country for working women with children. When I was teaching my
国際視野から見た日本の育児支援制度
(The
Japanese System for Child Rearing Seen in International Comparison)
course, I used a NHK program about Norway on this very subject.
Nonetheless,
Norway is experiencing a falling fertility rate. Prime
Minister Erna Solberg stressed
this falling fertility rate in her 2019 New Year’s speech.
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Japan
and South Korea are cases in point. Their demographic crises have
brought into sharp relief the difficulties that married women face in
trying to manage responsibilities in the workplace and at home.
Gender inequality is extremely high in both of these spheres in the
two countries.
But,
the Nordic examples show that high rates of gender equality are not
necessarily associated with high or rising fertility rates.
Further,
it is odd that China is not mentioned here. Its impact on overall
East Asian demographics is far greater than that of Japan and Korea
combined. While it rates higher than Japan and Korea in terms of
gender equality, it too has a falling fertility rate.
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International
surveys consistently show that Japanese and Korean men contribute the
least to housework compared with men in other OECD countries.
But,
again those other OECD countries also have falling fertility rates.
Korea is the lowest fertility rate country among the 35 OECD members
but Japan is mid-range.
-Studies
of dual-earner couples in many parts of Europe demonstrate that the
propensity to have a second child is related to the share of
household work done by the male partner.
That
may well be the case but the impact of this is not sufficient to
offset other factors that lead to lower fertility rates and it is
certainly no panacea for declining fertility rates.
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The
evidence is clear that gender inequality and fertility are closely
linked in many East Asian societies, particularly in Japan and South
Korea.
Correlation
is not causation.
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