“The low fertility rate, which has persisted for about three decades, will continue to contribute to low birth rates, especially in the context of the systematic decline in the number of women of reproductive age,” wrote the agency. “This trend is further exacerbated by the persistently high level of emigration abroad.”
If every country dealing with this wasn’t beholden to business interests requiring “line go up”, this sort of thing could be considered natural and self correcting rather than a crisis.
Population decline would mean more housing supply on the market, more competition to hire employees (better salaries and benefits), lower tuition costs to attract more students to your local university, etc. All the things that would make it easier for young couples who want kids to get established and stable earlier in life.
Population decline also generally means more stress on government programs since the working population paying a larger share of taxes and just generally supporting the retired population is declining while the retired population is increasing. Eventually it might level off, but for a long while it would be bad for everyone (unless the rate of decline is small enough).
Also a good point. You can only raise taxes or cut programs so much.
Bad for everyone who is not filthy rich. For those it will be tad bit unpleasant at worst. And that’s our main problem.
Yeah, I considered mentioning it but didn’t bother. If you have enough money, you can just ignore whatever the government provides and pay for it yourself (which is ofc why the super wealthy often don’t like government programs supporting the average person). Sort of makes a bad situation worse when the average person is already stressed from the problems of population decline and then they have to deal with government programs being gutted because the wealthy don’t like them.