Mallika Dureja
The fertility rate in South Korea is now the lowest in the world, breaking the benchmark that it had previously set for itself. Statistics Korea reported on Wednesday that the fertility rate, which can be defined as the average number of babies expected to be born to a South Korean woman over the course of her reproductive life, decreased to 0.78 in 2022 from 0.81 the previous year. This marked a decrease from the previous year’s figure of 0.81.
According to the findings of various experts, the rate must be at least 2.1 in order to maintain the country’s current population level of 52 million. The number of neonates fell to 249,000 in the most recent year, down from 260,600 in the year prior; this represents a percentage of the population that is lower than five percent.
In 2018, the fertility rate in the South East Asian country became the first in the region to fall to a level of fewer than one child per woman. According to a report by the BBC, widespread alarm was heard throughout South Korea in the year 2020 after the nation for the first time registered more deaths than births.
The pattern has continued up to the present time, and experts believe that some of the reasons discouraging people from having children include higher living costs, high real estate prices, the cost of education, greater economic anxiety, and the impact of the Covid pandemic.
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In spite of the fact that the country spends billions of dollars annually on childcare assistance, the government has been unable to stop the declining birth rate. In the past 16 years, the government has spent a total of 280 trillion won, which is equivalent to 210 billion dollars, in an attempt to reverse the declining birth rate. However, they have not achieved the desired results.
The falling birth rate has given rise to new concerns that a shrinking population could seriously harm the South Korean economy as a result of a lack of available workers, and these concerns have been stoked by recent statistics.
