[Initial Perspective] Establishing South Korea's 'Desired Image' Amid the 'Population Onus'

Recent statistics showing that South Korea's population naturally decreased by 57,300 last year personally served as a wake-up call for me. The familiar issues of low birthrate and aging population, heard for decades, have moved beyond social phenomena and now quietly erode national power like a drizzle soaking clothes. The current state of South Korea, as seen through statistics, is a country where people neither marry nor have children. Last year, the annual number of marriages dropped below 200,000 for the first time, recording 192,509. This is less than half of the 410,000 recorded in 1982, when data collection began. The number of married couples has been declining for ten years already.

The fertility rate, which ranks dead last among OECD member countries, is nothing short of a lament. The total fertility rate, the average number of children a woman of childbearing age is expected to have in her lifetime, was 0.81 last year. This is not only the lowest ever recorded but also far below the OECD average of 1.61. In the fourth quarter of last year, it plummeted further to 0.71. South Korea is the only country in the world with a fertility rate below 1. It also has a significant gap compared to the second lowest, Spain, at 1.23.

As the motivation to have children continues to deteriorate, the trend of natural population decrease?where deaths outnumber births?has become an irreversible river. Since the first 'dead cross' in 2020, the decline has accelerated. In the fourth quarter of last year alone, the population decreased by 30,153, catching up with the annual decrease of 32,611 in 2020. We have entered an era where the population naturally decreases by about 30,000 every quarter.

The problem lies in the fact that public awareness of this long-standing sign is remarkably low. This applies not only to the government but also to presidential candidates from all parties. Policies and pledges rely absolutely on fiscal spending, but the fundamental 'purpose' of the response is nowhere to be seen. Despite investing 200 trillion won of taxpayers' money over the past 15 years, the representative policy on low birthrate has completely reversed the input-output ratio, yet the approach of 'throwing money' to put out urgent fires has not changed at all. Promises such as paying parents 1 million won per month for one year after childbirth (Yoon Seok-yeol) or increasing the income replacement rate for parental leave benefits (Lee Jae-myung) are outdated and repeatedly failed measures. Five years ago, Sim Sang-jung, the Justice Party candidate in the presidential election, pledged a 50% capacity rate for public daycare centers, but it only appeared belatedly in 2022 as a policy goal to achieve a 50% public childcare utilization rate by 2025, showing a pattern of patchwork solutions.

Of course, the 'population cliff' caused by low birthrate and aging is not a problem unique to Korea. China, which achieved rapid growth through a demographic dividend, is soon to lose its title as the world's most populous country to India, and the United States is also accepting its first natural population decline since its founding. The population onus is an unstoppable global phenomenon.

The late Clayton Christensen, a distinguished professor at Harvard Business School, once asserted that without a purpose, any management theory's value is limited. His theory was that to accomplish a single purpose, one must clearly define the desired likeness, raise priorities, commit fully, and have clear evaluation metrics to review the process.

Perhaps we need to start by changing our attitude toward accepting the era of a 40 million population. Japan, which faced the population cliff problem earlier than us, has made it a national policy to maintain a population of 100 million rather than trying to increase the fertility rate, which has clear limits, and at least has not failed. South Korea, where young people must leave their hometowns for education and employment, crowd into the metropolitan area, and are trapped in future anxieties about home ownership and child-rearing amid intensified competition, is not the 'desired likeness' we want.

Asia Economy Economic Department Deputy Chief Kim Hye-won kimhye@

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.