S9 Ep48: What price to save Japan's ghost towns?

In the oldest Japanese municipalities, close to half the residents are already over 65. As young people move to cities, the retailers close, then the clinics, then the bus that used to reach the next town. Rural Japan is not simply ageing: it is emptying.

Elisa Giannone (CREI, CEPR) and her co-authors have analysed Japan's 1,741 municipalities from 1980 onwards. The oldest quarter of them lost around 26% of their population by 2010; the youngest quarter grew by 22%, and the gap between them is still widening.

Taxing city dwellers could reverse the trend. But that's a century-long policy, that would also lower national income per head by about 1.3%. There is no version of this without a bill attached, she warns.

The research behind this episode:

Giannone, Elisa, Yuhei Miyauchi, Nuno Paixão, Xinle Pang, and Yuta Suzuki. 2026. "Living in a Ghost Town: The Geography of Depopulation and Aging." CEPR Discussion Paper 21447 (gated).

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Elisa Giannone. 2026. "What price to save Japan's ghost towns?" VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Elisa Giannone is a researcher at CREI, an Adjunct Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, an Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics. She works on internal migration, regional income divergence, the spatial consequences of local shocks and the question of why people move.

Research cited in this episode

Social and natural population change. Demographers separate population movements through migration, known as social change, from births and deaths, known as natural change. Giannone's team runs both counterfactuals separately. Shut down migration and the oldest municipalities still age, but the population loss between 1980 and 2010 falls from nearly 0.3 log points to under 0.1. The framework follows Stanley Smith, Jeff Tayman and David Swanson's standard treatment of state and local population projections.

Scale economies in local public services. A 1% increase in local population is associated with a 0.53% fall in municipal government spending per head. Roads, schools, clinics and administration carry a large fixed cost, so the cost of serving each remaining resident rises as a town shrinks. This is the fiscal arithmetic that makes depopulation expensive.

Consumption-equivalent flow utility. The paper's measure of quality of life, amenity-adjusted real income. It captures what the residents of a place can actually buy and enjoy rather than what they earn on paper, which matters when the shops and the doctors are leaving.

The five oldest prefectures. Kochi, Shimane, Tokushima, Tottori and Yamagata, ranked by elderly share in 2015. They are the target group in every policy simulation, and their combined elderly share reaches nearly 60% by 2215 under the baseline projection.

Municipal extinction. Hiroya Masuda's 2014 book Chiho Shometsu warned that unipolar concentration in Tokyo would drive hundreds of rural municipalities out of existence. It set the terms of Japan's regional revitalisation debate, and the paper's projections give that warning a number.

United Nations World Population Prospects. Giannone's figures for the global picture, including the count of countries that have already passed peak population and those projected to do so by the mid 2050s, come from the UN projections rather than from the paper itself.

More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Economic decline and the rise of populism. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose explains what happens politically in the places this episode watches emptying, and why long term regional decline shows up at the ballot box.

Related reading on VoxEU.org

Living in a ghost town: The geography of depopulation and ageing. The authors' own column, with the charts behind this episode.

Japan's age wave: Challenges and solutions, a column by Andrew Stawasz, Paige Kirby, JP Sevilla and David Bloom on the national scale of the problem this episode breaks down by region.

Mobile seniors and local economic development. Marco Badilla-Maroto, Benjamin Faber, Antoine Levy and Mathilde Munoz find that retirees moving into poorer French regions bring economic gains with them, a useful counterweight to the Japanese story.

Population shrinking and the future of European municipalities, in which Friedrich Heinemann, Alexander Kalb and Benny Geys set out the scale economies problem for Europe's own shrinking towns.