Until the 1970s, women in the most prosperous Asian economies like South Korea, Japan, and China were having more than five children on average. Today, that trend is starkly different. For the sixth consecutive year, South Korea has recorded the world’s lowest fertility rate. In the latest figures released by the government on Feb. 28, that number sunk to a new low—from 0.84 children per couple in 2022 to 0.81 in 2023. By 2024, the rate is projected to fall even further to 0.68.
The trend is mirrored elsewhere. For the last 70 years, fertility rates have decreased worldwide, with a total decline of 50%. Even in the most advanced economies, the rate is now 1.6 children per couple, compared to the recommended rate of 2.1 for countries wanting to keep a steady population without any migration.
But rates in these East Asian countries have fallen at a steeper rate than anywhere else. In South Korea, falling birth rates are one of the three crucial factors that characterize what’s called the “Sampo,” or “three giving-up” generation: women in their 20s and 30s who have given up dating, marriage, and having children, in part because of economic pressures. In 2018, then-Vice Finance Minister Minister Kim Yong-beom declared this trend a “death cross.” In Japan, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently issued a dire warning that the country was “on the brink” of being “socially dysfunctional.” China, which reversed its one-child policy in 2016 to encourage families to have more children, lost its record of being the most populous country to India last year after its population dropped for the first khbrknews in six decades.
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