More countries, including China, are grappling with shrinking and aging populations

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BEIJING (AP) — A growing number of countries are confronting the dual challenges of population decline and aging, as younger generations opt to have fewer children and advances in healthcare extend life expectancy.

China said Friday that its population fell for the third straight year in 2024, falling by almost 1.4 million to 1.408 billion. Elsewhere in Asia, Japan’s population has been falling for 15 years, while South Korea’s growth turned negative in 2021. In Italy, the number of births has fallen below 400,000 for the first time since the 19th century.

The population has peaked in 63 countries and territories, about half in Europe, the United Nations says. The U.N. projects another 48 will hit their peak over the next 30 years.

Globally, the population of 8.2 billion people is still growing, with the U.N. projecting it will reach 10.3 billion in roughly 60 years and then start to decline.

For many countries with shrinking populations, the slow-moving but hard-to-reverse trend has prompted governments to offer financial incentives to try to encourage people to have children to help support growing numbers of elders.

Japan has shrunk by 3 million people since 2008

The Japanese government’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, called the demographic situation critical last year, saying that the next six years will be “the last chance for us to possibly reverse the trend.”

The population of Japan peaked in 2008 at 128 million people and has fallen to 125 million since then. The number of births hit a record low of 730,000 in 2023.

Surveys show that younger Japanese are increasingly reluctant to marry or have children, discouraged by bleak job prospects, a cost of living that is rising at a faster pace than salaries and a corporate culture difficult for women and working mothers.

Japan’s population is projected to fall to 87 million people by 2070, when four out of every 10 people will be 65 years of age or older.

One segment of the population is still growing: an 11% increase in foreign residents helped push their population above 3 million for the first time in 2023, making up nearly 3% of the total.

In China, a higher retirement age and “elderly universities”

China is growing older, a trend that could sap economic growth and challenge the government’s capacity to provide for a larger elderly population with fewer workers.

Some see opportunity. An “elderly university’ in Beijing, the Chinese capital, has enrolled 150 students in dance, singing, yoga and modeling classes. The business has yet to break even but founder Liu Xiuqin believes in the market’s future, given the value that retirees born in the 1960s place on quality of life and health compared to earlier generations.

The government is raising the retirement age over the next 15 years to 63 from 60 years old for men; to 55 from 50 for women in factory and other blue-collar jobs and to 58 from 55 for women in white-collar work.

China ceded its position as the most populated country to India in 2023, after the population began to fall in 2022. Women are having fewer babies despite the easing of China’s one-child policy to allow up to three children.

The population of 1.4 billion people — still more than 10 times that of Japan — is projected to fall to 1.3 billion by 2050.

The Pope is urging Italians to have more children

Backed by the Vatican, a succession of Italian governments have vowed to address the social, economic and cultural reasons behind one of the world’s lowest birthrates.

Pope Francis has repeatedly urged Italians to have more children to invert what he has called the demographic winter facing many industrialized countries.

The government of Premier Giorgia Meloni has a campaign to encourage at least 500,000 births annually by 2033, a rate that demographers say is necessary to grow the wage-earning population and prevent the economy from collapsing as retirees draw on their pensions.

The number of births has fallen steadily from about 577,000 in 2008 to 380,000 in 2023, the first year since Italy’s unification that the number fell below 400,000.

Studies say that’s due to a combination of factors, including a lack of openings for affordable child care, low salaries and a tradition of women caring for older parents.

Foreigners reverse decline in South Korea, but just barely

South Korea’s population rebounded in 2023 thanks to an influx of foreigners.

The birthrate fell again in a country where many younger people don’t feel the same obligation to have children that their parents and grandparents did.

Some are put off by the high cost of raising children in a highly competitive education system and a patriarchal culture that forces women to take on most childcare duties.

The number of foreign residents rose 10% to 1.9 million people, partly because of an extension of a working visa program, the country’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing the government statistics agency.

That was enough to boost the total population ever so slightly — by 0.2% to 51.8 million people.

Of those, 9.5 million are 65 or older. The demographic trends have sparked concern about labor shortages and strains on the government budget.

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Associated Press writer Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed.