The nation’s fertility charge, which signifies the typical variety of youngsters a lady could have in her lifetime, sunk to 0.81 in 2021 — 0.03% decrease than the earlier 12 months, in accordance with government-run Statistics Korea.

To place that into perspective, the 2021 fertility charge was 1.6 in america and 1.3 in Japan, which additionally noticed its lowest charge on report final 12 months. In some African nations, the place fertility charges are the very best on this planet, the determine is 5 or 6.

To keep up a steady inhabitants, nations want a fertility charge of two.1 — something above that signifies inhabitants development.

South Korea’s start charge has been dropping since 2015, and in 2020 the nation recorded extra deaths than births for the primary time — which means the variety of inhabitants shrank, in what’s referred to as a “inhabitants demise cross.”

And as fertility charges drop, South Korean ladies are additionally having infants later in life. The common age of ladies that gave start in 2021 was 33.4 — 0.2 years older than the earlier 12 months, in accordance with the statistics company.

In the meantime, South Korea’s inhabitants can also be getting older, indicating a demographic decline that specialists worry will depart the nation with too few folks of working age to help its burgeoning aged inhabitants — each by paying taxes and filling jobs in fields comparable to well being care and residential help.

As of final November, 16.8% of South Koreans have been over 65 years outdated, whereas simply 11.8% have been age 14 or beneath.

That proportion of aged Koreans is rising quickly — it elevated by greater than 5% between 2020 and 2021, in accordance with census knowledge. In the meantime, the working age inhabitants — folks between ages 15 and 64 — declined by 0.9% between 2020 and 2021.

In South Korea and Japan, there are comparable causes behind the decline in births — together with demanding work cultures, stagnating wages, rising prices of residing and skyrocketing housing costs.

Many South Korean ladies say they simply do not have the time, cash, or emotional capability to go on dates as they put their profession first in a extremely aggressive job market by which they typically face a patriarchal tradition and gender inequality.

The South Korean authorities has launched a number of measures in recent times to sort out the falling fertility charge, together with permitting each dad and mom to take parental depart on the identical time and increasing paid paternal depart.

Social campaigns have inspired males to tackle a extra lively position in childcare and house responsibilities, and in some components of the nation, authorities are handing out “new child vouchers” to encourage dad and mom to have extra youngsters.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR