Like the European Union (and unlike the United States), Japan has a declining population. Coupled with an exceptionally long life expectancy (85 years for women and 78 for men, as of 2005) and one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, this means that by 2050, 30% of Japanese will be over the age of 60. While the government has been introducing various incentives for people to have more children, no return on investment could be expected till the 2030s, when the children born in the early 2000s enter the workforce. (Immigration is politically unpopular in this country.) According to official figures, the number of individuals below 15 years of age in Japan was 13.6% of the population in 2007 and was predicted to fall to 12.3% in 2015, or about half that of the elderly. 2007 was the twenty-sixth consecutive year in which the number of people under the age of 15 dropped in Japan. Japan's birth rate fell from roughly replacement level, 2.1, in the early 1970s to 1.26 in 2005. Government officials estimated that population of Japan would decrease 30% by the 2050s, from 127 million to below 90 million.