South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday called for “extraordinary determination” to address the country’s falling birth rate.
In an interview with Seoul’s Yonhap News newspaper, the president said:
Time is running short. I hope that every government agency approaches the issue of low birthrates with extraordinary determination.
Yoon called for “effective solutions” to the declining birth rate, urging officials to approach the problem from a “fundamentally different perspective.”
The steady decline in South Korea’s population has policymakers worried as the country’s fertility rate was recorded at a low of 0.7 in the third quarter of this year. The news agency reported:
The rate is significantly below the replacement level of 2.1, which is necessary to maintain the population stability at 51 million.
Pointing to “intense competition” in areas like education as one of the causes behind the falling birth rate, Yoon noted:
The issue of low birthrates requires us to take the situation more seriously and contemplate the causes and solutions from a different dimension than before.
Although the South Korean government has spent some $200 billion to stimulate population growth over the past 16 years, the country has seen a steady decline in the number of new births.
In its latest report, the World Economic Forum warned that if the current low birth rate continues, the East Asian country’s population “will be less than half of what it is today” by the end of the century.
South Korea’s birth rate hit a record low for the third consecutive year in 2022, with just 249,000 babies born in the country, further reducing the population by 4.4 per cent from the previous record low in 2021, Statistics Korea said. The data showed that last year, the average woman gave birth to her first child at the age of 33, followed by 34.2 and 35.6.
