Introduction: Asia's Position in the New Global Demography

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Notes

1 The workshop took place over 2 days in February 2005 and was co-convened by the authors of this introduction together with Prof. Vivienne Shue, Leverhulme Professor of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford.

2 As well as the papers published here, others who presented papers at the workshop were Aris Ananta, Elisabeth Schroeder-Butterfill, John Campbell, Ruth Campbell, Barbara Harriss-White, Judith Farquhar, Alex Kalachi, Philip Kreager, George Leeson, Yoshio Maya, Roddy McKinnon, Rachel Murphy, Todd Petersen, Mark Rebick and Teresa Smith.

3 For a good overview in English of the different explanations for this phenomenon, see the transcript of a roundtable discussion in the February 2006 issue of the journal Japan Echo, which was originally published in Japanese in the influential journal Bungei Shunjū in December 2005.

4 The average age for marriage in Japan for women rose to 27.8 in 2004 and for the birth of the first child to 28.9; the number of children born outside wedlock in Japan has hardly risen above 1% throughout the post-war period.

5 Campbell & Ikegami (2003, p. 23) pointed out two other reasons for introducing welfare programmes for the elderly in the 1980s in Japan: long-term hospital bed-blocking (nearly half of all hospital in-patients were over the age of 65 and around one-third of these had been hospitalized for more than a year) and the growing belief that elderly care should not fall on daughters-in-law but on outside carers.

6 In the 15 years of the Gold Plans, approximately 800 000 new beds for the elderly were provisioned and the equivalent of around £80 billion invested in support for the elderly, half of which was subsidized by the government.

7 According to some critics, 70% of Japan's social welfare budget goes on programmes for the aged, such as medical care and pensions, while only 4% is spent on services for children, such as child benefits and subsidizing childcare.

8 The difference in the number of older people still in work in Japan, the world's second largest economy, is particularly conspicuous when compared with the USA, the world's largest economy: in the former, over 60% of the household income of people aged 65 or over comes from employment, while in the latter it is only 30%.

9 The Committee for Social Development (2001) report on International Strategy for Action on Ageing identified the following adoption of commitments and guiding principles of major United Nations conferences and summits as having played a significant role in advancing the framework for policies on ageing: Health for All in the Twenty-first Century and the Alma-Ata Declaration, 1978; Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action of the World Conference on Human Rights, 1993; Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, 1994; Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action of the World Summit for Social Development, 1995; Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women, 1995; the Habitat Agenda and the Istanbul Declaration on Human Settlements of the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), 1996; Dakar Framework for Action of the World Education Forum, 2000; the Further Initiatives for Social Development of the Twenty-fourth Special Session of the General Assembly, 2000; and the United Nations Millennium Declaration of the United Nations Millennium Summit, 2000.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Goodman

As well as financial support from the three institutions sponsoring the workshop, we would like to acknowledge the funding we received from the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies at Oxford, the Astor Travel Fund administered through the University of Oxford, the editorial committee of Oxford Development Studies and the Wellcome Trust.