For the rest of this course I have chosen to learn about Japan. I have heard a lot of different ideas about the healthcare system over there and I am really interested to learn more.

The demographic indicators for Japan have seen a both positive and negative trends within the last couple of years. The overall annual growth rate for the country since 2012 is -0.3%, meaning there are more people leaving than staying within the country of Japan. This also correlates with the increase of the crude death rate between from 6.7 (in 1990) to 9.7 (in 2012). With the increase in the crude death rate and the decrease in the crude birth rate (down to 8.4) it makes sense that there is a negative trend within the current population. What doesn’t make sense is the life expectancy is up to 79 years, much higher than the recent past. The urbanized population of Japan in 2012 was a staggering 91.9%.

The urbanization may have played a role in the about of GNI per capita in 2012 being $47870. The GDP per capita average annual growth rate decreased to 0.7%, up from 3.4%. The average annual rate of inflation in Japan is -0.9%. As a Nation, Japan spends 7.4% of their budget on health, 3.8% of their budget on education and only 1% of the budget on the military; all of these percentages are much lower than those of the United States of America.

For women in Japan over 100% of them finish primary school. Women are also expected to live longer than men (108.5%). The contraceptive prevalence for women in Japan is 54.3% which is almost twenty percent lower than that of the U.S. When giving birth, 99.8% of women give birth in an institutional delivery. They also have fantastic odds for maternal mortality rate with it being 1 in 13,100. To give some perspective on the statistic, the maternal mortality rate in the US is only 1 in 2,400.

The rate of progress for Japan in the category of “under-5 mortality rank has had a steady annual rate of reduction of 3.4% since 1990. The GDP per capita average annual growth rate as slowed to 0.7%. For women, the fertility rate in 2012 had also decreased from years prior to 1.4 with an average annual rate of reduction to 0.5%. For the disparities by residence, both urban and rural use of sanitation facilities were 100%.

I am very interested in diving deeper into how the healthcare system treats women, and what disparities may lay within the treatment that women receive.