A Japanese regional government is offering residents ¥20,000 ($125) subsidies for using dating apps, to try to address the country’s population decline upstream of actual baby-making.
Kochi prefecture’s initiative aims to reduce the barriers to finding suitable partners. Whether or not the plan works, it may be aiming at the right target: Married couples in Japan have only slightly fewer children than they did in 1977, but the number of marriages has cratered, suggesting that the fertility crisis may really be a couple-formation crisis.
A similar pattern — number of children within marriages stable, actual marriages down — holds true in the US, but not in parts of Europe, where couples are forming, but having fewer children.
