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Does a Growth Strategy Based on an Agglomeration Economy Conflict with Reviving the Fertility Rate?
KONDO KeisukeFellow, RIETI
The debate over local revitalization in Japan has heated up again recently. The government's 2014 Basic Policies for Economic and Fiscal Policy Management and Structural Reform lists maintaining a stable population of about 100 million people 50 years from now as a basic policy. The government has also set up an office under the Shinzo Abe administration to prepare for the establishment of a revitalization headquarters for the city, people, and creating employment, which will take steps to reinvigorate rural areas and overcome the problem of declining population. Driving this is a uniquely Japanese problem: a population that is rapidly declining as the fertility rate falls and the population ages.
Perhaps one development that greatly affected the government's judgment was a list of municipalities that are "in danger of vanishing," as announced by the Japan Policy Council several months earlier. A similar discussion took place in July 2014 at the National Governors' Association meeting in Saga prefecture, where the participants adopted a "declaration of declining fertility state of emergency," which stated that declining fertility countermeasures should be addressed as a national issue.
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