Recently, the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had gone on record to it’s “now or never” — and he was referring to a reversal of his country’s falling fertility rate, which stands at 1.34 per woman, whereas the broad consensus is that a rate of 2.1 per woman ensures a stable population for a country.
And now, an even grimmer statistic has emerged with South Korea — one of the most prosperous countries in the world going by per capita GDP — recording the world’s lowest fertility rate in 2022 (breaking its own record of the previous year): at 0.78.
The country has been spending billions of dollars in an attempt to address this problem with sops such as childcare subsidies, and yet this alarming freefall continues.
A shrinking population is going to work against a country’s economic prospects, and many are attributing it to a bunch of new-age social issues (such as nuclear families, women not getting married or getting married later in life etc). While it is unrealistic to believe that eco-systems can be altered suddenly, what is intriguing is that state-sponsored benefits are not working to plan.
While the number of internal migrants in India has not been updated for more than 10 years, experts say they could make up as much as 40% of the electorate
Regeneration programmes can preserve the old while fostering economic prosperity through the balanced and deft encouragement of retail
Companies large and small, and everything in between, produce codes of conduct for employees, these don’t quite fit the specific role and powers of board members