SEOUL, South Korea: Data from Statistics South Korea released this week showed that the country’s fertility rate, already the world’s lowest, again dropped in 2023, with the average number of expected babies for a South Korean woman falling to a record low of 0.72 compared with 0.78 in 2022.
The figure is below the rate of 2.1 per woman required for a steady population.
Despite the billions of dollars spent by Seoul to reverse the population decline, since 2018, South Korea has been the only Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) member with a rate below 1.
South Korea, whose fertility rate dropped for a fourth consecutive year in 2023, also has the worst gender pay gap in the OECD, with Korean women only being paid around two-thirds the income of men on average.
Jung Jae-hoon, professor at Seoul Women’s University, said, “Women typically cannot build on their experience to climb higher at workplaces because they are often the only ones doing the childcare and often need to rejoin the workforce after extended leaves.”
The country, whose population of 51 million is on track to halve by the end of this century, has previously forecasted its fertility rate to fall further to 0.68 in 2024.
The capital, Seoul, had the lowest fertility rate of 0.55 in 2023 and has the country’s highest housing costs.
To ease fears of “national extinction” due to the declining fertility rate, South Korea’s major political parties vowed to provide more public housing and easier loans to encourage people to have children childbirth before the elections in April.
In addition to South Korea, neighboring Japan said this week that the number of babies born in the country in 2023 fell for an eighth consecutive year to a new record low.
In 2022, Japan’s fertility rate hit a record low of 1.26, while China recorded 1.09, also a record low.
