Marriage, money and maternity: A third of young women in Japan may never have children, says study
Japan may never have children, a government institute said on Wednesday, in the latest data spelling an uphill battle to reverse a dwindling population in the world's third-largest economy.
The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) estimated in a report that 33.4% of women born in 2005 would be childless. The most optimistic scenario had that number at 24.6% and the worst at 42%.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in June promised to tackle the population crisis with «unprecedented» measures including bigger payouts for families with three or more children.
A Kyodo News poll published shortly after, however, showed that about two-thirds of the public were not hopeful the policies would be effective.
«With the rising cost of living, I don't think people feel they can afford to or comfortably say they want to have children,» 23-year-old Anna Tanaka told Reuters.
The number of children in Japan has been falling for more than four decades as the appetite for marriage and parenting has waned and financial worries have grown, surveys show.
The IPSS determines the expected percentage of childless women by taking into account factors such as age of marriage in estimating the fertility rate.
Miho Iwasawa, the IPSS's director of population dynamics research, said people were getting married later, leading to a decline in births.
In 2020, women got married for the first time at an average age of 29.4, or 3.9 years later than in 1985, government data shows.
