Exploring Japan’s crisis. Entangled in-between immigration and Artificial Intelligence.
Japan is opening up to immigrants to respond to an increasing labor shortage due to declining population. In an interview with The Economist, Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, said the population was both declining and ageing at “unprecedented speed”. Following this problem, a law to accommodate 345,000 foreign workers for a period of five years came into force.The government also announced that it would create a “designated-skills” visa in addition to another the specialized visa type in order to bring in 500,000 new workers by 2025, in agriculture, construction, hotels, nursing and shipbuilding. This is a controversial turning point in a homogeneous country that remains very reluctant to open its borders to immigrants.
Context
Japan has historically been wary of admitting foreigners. It is considered as one of the world’s most homogeneous countries: just 2% of residents are foreigners, compared with 4% in South Korea and 16% in France. The reasons for this attitude range from fears that outsiders will bring crime and damage societal practices, to concerns that Japanese residents will not be able to communicate properly with them. But Japan’s population is old and getting smaller. To fill shortages in the labour force caused by the shrinking working-age population, government policy has focused on getting more women and old people into work, and of course technology using artificial intelligence. Well at the edge of digital transformation and living 50 years ahead of the world, you can’t think that they wouldn’t think about employing their technology, after all it’s a major resource in Japan. So Japan has been relying on robotics, but this is only on the short run. What if more and more robots are produced to cater for the old and to do domestic jobs, it won’t still solve the demographic problem of Japan. Also Robots are not human beings they could never replace human being except if we want the Ex-machina effect.
In this context the Japanese government has only 2 options, turn to robotic and artificial intelligence or bring in more foreign labour resources.
Why this problem?
In 1945 after the 2nd world war, Japan experienced a post war baby boom. In 1948, the Japanese government passed a law to reduce the number of births per year to slow down the birth rate. From that time birth rates substantially dropped. Also one of the main cause of the low birth rate is that Japan has a low fertility rate, often associated with the tempo effect and with the fact that many people in Japan no longer married and are now workaholics. Between 1980 and 2010, the percentage of the population who had never married increased from 22% to almost 30%, even as the population continued to age, and by 2035 one in four men will not marry during their childbearing years.
Also, Japan is one of the countries with the highest rates of life expectancy. Japan’s life expectancy in 2016 was 85 years. The life expectancy is 81.7 for males and 88.5 for females. We could also associate the fact that Japan’s advance technology has grossly contributed to the high life expectancy rate especially with the development of technology in health innovation. We could ask that at what extent will technology have an impact on Japan’s health care.
The number of employed senior citizens in Japan now exceeds 8 million. Companies are actively seeking older workers in a bid to overcome labor shortages. On their part, elderly citizens are willing to remain on the job even past retirement age. With this fact, the Japanese government plans to increase the retirement age from 62 to 65. This comes as the result of government spending on pensions to retired citizens. If the retirement age goes up to 65 and later to 70, it will as well reduce spending on pensions.
Tapping Resources from Africa.
As you may know the labour force in any economy is crucial, but this type of resource is unevenly distributed. We could take for example the demographic boom in Africa with an excess growth of more than 2 % only in 2019. And this doesn’t end there, as by the year 2050 Africa is expected to own more than a quarter of the worlds population with a forecast of 2.5 billion inhabitants. What is even more surprising is that more 60% of Africa’s population is made up of youths as compared to Japan’s 25% by 2050. Does this ring a bell? The need for Labour in Japan is thus a matter of emergency.
Though it may not be seen to often Japan has had a significant relationship with Africa with respect to diplomatic ties and foreign aid. Through the GAGP program for instance, Japan has been building schools, hospitals and offering financial assistance to African states like Cameroon, South Africa, Sudan, Nigeria just to name a few. Japan recently announced tripling its Aid to Africa as well as improving their diplomatic ties.
Opportunity come in from the fact that the new law enables a lot of internship and short working period opportunities for young Africans. This might be a good opportunity to learn from Japan’s established advance in Technology. One of the world’s most notable explorers Drew Binsky has described Japan as living 10 years ahead of the world. This might be a determining factor to etablish a transfer of knowledge and tech resources from Japan to Africa.
But what about China
While it is true that China’s actions in Africa in terms of investment, aid and diplomatic mission is well known and unrivaled, they occur in a different context. Despite the collosal amount of money invested in Africa by tThe main could be that China’s growth rate has been on a steady decrease. During the late 2000’s, China experienced growth rates for up to 14%. This is even more contradictory when this era was marked by the Global Financial Crisis. As of now China’s growth rate is at 6.9%. So the best take is that they have to find emerging markets for their home based company, start offshoring, search for raw materials at cheaper rates and of course this goes with international trade. It seems like China is the first one to understand that Africa will be the future market to conquer and is putting all measures in place to do so, Foreign Aid, Chino-African summits, trade agreements, just to name a few of them. But it is clear that all of them are clearly for trade and maybe a win-win approach you may think.
Come think of it, it has been noticed the Chinese especially the ones in Africa don’t easily transfer technological know how although a few companies like Huawei do so with programs enabling young Africans to grow in high demand skills.
Japan’s population problem could be part of the solution for African states to enable the transfer of technology and also for people in their youthful age to work overseas and send back money to their families.
Moreover, Japan’s immigration policy gives allowance for people to come to Japan to gain work experience and knowledge through short term internships or transfer. This could impact tech hubs in a positive manner who need tech skills from the western world. Hubs in developing countries like Rwanda, which has witnessed a rise of Hubs could eventually benefit from this transfer of technology to enhance growth and development. Institutions like Afrilabs tend to promote the growth of these hubs as well as encourage tech, innovation and entrepreneurship in the African ecosystem. Their network could expand as a result of such policies as well as promoting tech in Africa.