South Korea has become a “super-aged society”, with 20 per cent of its population aged 65 or older, official data showed on Tuesday, a gloomy trend driven by an alarmingly low birth rate.
Asia’s fourth-largest economy recorded just 0.7 births per woman last year — one of the lowest birth rates in the world and far below the replacement rate of 2.1 needed to sustain the current population.
That means South Korea’s population is ageing and shrinking rapidly.
Those aged 65 and older “account for 20 per cent of the 51.2 million registered population, numbering 10 million,” the interior ministry said in a news release on Tuesday, placing South Korea alongside Japan, Germany and France as a “super-aged society.”
It also means the elderly population has more than doubled since 2008, when it numbered fewer than five million, according to the ministry.
Men account for 44 per cent of the current 65-and-older group, the data showed.
The government has poured billions of dollars into encouraging more births, with Seoul authorities offering subsidies for egg freezing in one recent effort.
However, such efforts have failed to deliver the intended results and the population is projected to fall to 39 million by 2067, when the median population age will be 62.
Experts say there are multiple causes for the twin phenomena of low marriage and birth rates, ranging from high child-rearing costs and soaring property prices to a notoriously competitive society that makes securing well-paid jobs difficult.
The double burden on working mothers, who shoulder the bulk of household chores and child care while maintaining their careers, is another key factor, they say.
I think that Japan and Korea are just the first of many in a growing trend. By the mid-Century, China, with its past “one-child policy” will be in serious trouble because of the lack of young people. The easiest answer is encouraging immigration, a solution which seems to be rejected by these Asian countries for reasons of cultural or racial purity. Maybe language has something to do with it. English speaking countries, such as Great Britain, U.S.A., Canada, and Australia have all used immigration as a way to solve this problem, but it’s also a fact that the English language is a second language for people around the world. How many people have Chinese, Korean, or Japanese as a second language?