South Koreans alarmed by prospect of extinction by 2750

25/8/2014

By Simon Mundy

In the year 2621, in the northwestern province of Gyeonggi-do, the last South Korean will enter the world – according to an apocalyptic parliamentary report reflecting national anxiety about one of the world’s lowest birth rates.

South Korea has a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman, according to a 2012 World Bank estimate, which puts the country joint last in the birth stakes alongside nations including Singapore, Spain and Greece

According to the outlandish simulation by the parliamentary research service, which has stoked morbid media discussion, the national population will decline from 50m today to 5m in 2172, 100,000 in 2379 – and total extinction before 2750.

“Our low birth rate is a very grave problem that threatens the existence of the nation,” said Yang Seung-jo, a liberal MP who commissioned the report.

South Korea’s birth rate is below that of China, despite the latter’s one-child policy, and Japan, where analysts estimate that sales of nappies for the elderly will soon outsell those for infants.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development believes that by 2050 there will be almost three-quarters as many South Koreans aged over 65 as there are aged 15-64, up from about a seventh in 2012.

South Korea is already struggling to cope with its elderly population, of whom 49 per cent live on less than half the national median income. Many South Koreans no longer adhere to the tradition that children should care for their aged parents, and the suicide rate among elderly people quintupled over the two decades to 2011.

The government has made efforts to encourage childbirth – a reversal of campaigns to restrict family size in the 1980s, which are seen as having helped put the country’s birth rate on its declining trend.

It has capped fees in the private tuition industry, which had grown to consume a 10th of household income, discouraging many parents from having more than one child. President Park Geun-hye has also sharply increased public day care provision since coming to power last year. Such initiatives in recent years may have contributed to a rise in the fertility rate, from a trough of 1.1 children per woman in 2006.

Cha Woo-gyu, a professor at Korea National University of Education, said the parliamentary report’s prediction of national extinction failed to take into account such measures, or the effect of rising immigration, adding that “the report’s purpose is to generate alarm”.

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