Japan & Niger

In no other country in the world are people older than in Japan. Even today, every third inhabitant of the island nation is over sixty years old, and this trend is rising. The consequences: an unprecedented range of sports, education and leisure activities for senior citizens, but also an overburdened pension system, slowly dying ghost towns and policies that often focus more on the next pension increase than on investments in the future and education of the younger generation. The country is thus the first to experience a development that could also be faced by many other regions of the world in a few years’ time – from China to large swathes of Europe and South America. We talk to the Japanese economist Keisuke Otsu about the consequences for a society when the percentage of older people in the population becomes larger and larger.

Niger forms a clear contrast: statistically speaking, every woman in this West African country has seven children, the average age is not even sixteen, and the elderly form a small minority. By 2050, the population could grow from 23 million today to more than 60 million. We ask demographer Nouhou Abdoul Moumouni, who himself comes from Niger, what the causes of this dynamic are and what consequences it has for the country that the youngest generation is growing so explosively.

Host: Benjamin Bergner, 1014 - Space for Ideas / Goethe-Institut