South Korea has announced a catastrophic drop in the birth rate

On February 22, the National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Korea released two demographic reports – “Interim Results of Birth and Death Statistics in 2022” and “Population Trends for December 2022”. The statistics cited therein and the conclusions of experts made the heads of journalists and ordinary readers cringe, and the newspapers came out with moving headlines: “Korea is disappearing”, “We are getting old and we are dying” , etc.According to the latest data, according to the results of 2022, the total fertility rate of the Republic of Kazakhstan continued to decline, further decreasing by 0.03, reaching an indicator of 0.78 people. This figure reflects the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. This indicator was the lowest among all developed countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It turns out that now a Korean woman gives birth to less than one person in her lifetime, while simply maintaining the population requires a coefficient of 2.1.A total of 249,000 babies were born in South Korea last year, down 4.4 percent from a year earlier. It should be noted that the decline in the birth rate happened before our eyes. In 2002, 497 thousand children were born, and in 1992 – 731 thousand.All this “pulled” in the direction of deterioration and other demographic and social indicators. Korean women, according to statistics, become mothers later. They give birth on average at 33 years old, whereas even in the OECD the average is less than 30 years old. The proportion of mothers aged 35 and over in South Korea exceeded one-third, reaching 35.7%. In addition, the country is experiencing a continuation of the downward trend in population and an increase in the general average age. Simply put, South Korea is aging, decreasing in number, and among all the elderly, the proportion of elderly people is increasing, the number of young people, on the contrary, is decreasing.Another notable feature of Korean society is the reduction in family size and the marked increase in the proportion of people living alone. In Kazakhstan, the share of one-person households has already exceeded one-third, becoming the largest relative group. At the same time, a large number of young people make a conscious choice in favor of loneliness, not wanting to start a family and have children. At the same time, there is a rapid increase in the number of pets, which, according to experts, is a phenomenon resulting from general demographics. Although people live alone, they don’t want absolute solitude, having pets. The main choice is made in favor of small dogs.It should be noted that the problem of declining birth rates in South Korea has been talked about for a long time, spending a lot of money trying to solve it. Thus, for the period from 2006 to 2021, about 280 trillion won (over $220 billion) was spent to combat low birth rates, but these efforts could not improve the situation.