South Korea's fertility rate drops to lowest in world

**misskit** · 24-02-2021, 08:40 PM

South Korea's fertility rate fell to the lowest in the world last year, data showed on Wednesday, as uncertainty over the coronavirus discouraged couples from marrying and having children.

The number of expected babies per South Korean woman fell to 0.84 in 2020, dropping further from the country's previous record low of 0.92 a year earlier, the official annual reading from the Statistics Korea showed.

That is the lowest among over 180 member countries of the World Bank, and far below 1.73 in the United States and 1.42 in Japan.

The grim milestone comes after the population fell for the first time ever last year.

Asia's fourth-largest economy is the fastest aging country in the OECD. The government has failed to reverse the falling birth rate despite spending billions of dollars each year on childcare subsidies and maternity leave support.

The nation's capital Seoul logged the lowest birth rate of 0.64.

In some recent reports, the number of newborns in China also plummeted by 15 per cent in 2020 from a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Public Security, with the onset of the novel coronavirus disrupting the economy and weighing on decisions to have a family.

China saw 10.035 million births last year, the ministry said on Monday, compared with 11.79 million in 2019. Of those born last year, 52.7% were boys and 47.3% girls.

Posts on Chinese social media with the hashtag 'How to get China out of a low fertility trap' were viewed 120 million times recently, with some comments linking low fertility rates to high living costs, while others said social norms were changing.

“The declining fertility rate actually reflects the progress in the thinking of Chinese people - women are no longer a fertility tool,” wrote a user of Weibo, a Twitter-like microblog popular in China.

South Korea's fertility rate drops to lowest in world, World News | wionews.com

**russellsimpson** · 25-02-2021, 12:02 AM

Originally Posted by misskit

Of those born last year, 52.7% were boys and 47.3% girls.

Which tells us that many female babies (in China) are never seeing the light of day and lay in shallow frozen graves. Nature favours a fertility rate slightly tilted to female births being about one percent higher than that of males. Korea's falling birth-rate is a bit of a head scratcher although statistics collected last year are definitely in the outlier camp which makes the numbers pretty much impossible to work with from a historical tracking point of view.

Korea has one of the highest population densities in the world at 503 people per square kilometer, I'm not sure that would have anything to do with fertility rates although there are scholars who would argue otherwise.

The increasing difficulty in maintaining a work/life balance is always a major contributing to a declining fertility rate, in Korea and elsewhere.

**harrybarracuda** · 25-02-2021, 12:17 AM

If the chinkies are shooting blanks, the world's population of endangered species is doomed.

**TTraveler** · 25-02-2021, 06:48 AM

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

If the chinkies are shooting blanks, the world's population of endangered species is doomed.

Nothing like a good dose of tiger penis tea to fix infertility.

Tigers in Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Universal Apothecary – National Geographic Society Newsroom

**Backspin** · 25-02-2021, 06:54 AM

What took so long ? They are suffering the same affliction as Japan.

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