Japan’s labor force, namely, the population between 15 and 64 years old, already started to decline from the second half of the 1990s, and the number of actual workers has started to decline slightly, on average, since 2000. To maintain and raise growth rate when the number of workers is unlikely to grow, there is no way but to raise productivity.
Raising productivity itself is an important issue, regardless of change in demographics, and it becomes increasingly important in a situation when it is difficult to expect growth in the labor force. Specifically, the productivity growth rate measured by the aforementioned per capita valueadded has been declining from an annual average of 3.2 percent in the 1980s to about 1 percent since the 1990s.