South Korea, the country with the world’s lowest birth rate, expects it to fall even further in the next two years while its overall population is expected to plummet to levels not seen since the 1970s.
The new data underscores the demographic timebomb that South Korea and other East Asian nations like Japan and Singapore are facing as their societies rapidly age just a few decades after their dramatic industrialization.
South Korea’s total fertility rate, the number of births from a woman in her lifetime, is now expected to drop from 0.78 in 2022 to 0.65 in 2025, according to the government’s Statistics Korea.
Basically if there are more older people in a society that need assistance and not enough working age people to assist them, it quickly becomes very problematic for the government. They are forced to scramble to do things like incentivise having children as well as attract foreign workers. If you don’t do this, older people will accuse you of abandoning them after they supported the country their whole life by paying taxes and not breaking the law etc. However, on the other hand, doing these things is expensive and can put huge strain on the country’s finances / economy.
It basically becomes a choice between losing votes and support of older generations or putting the country in a huge economic decline.
This is made worse too by the country’s unique culture and language. Something like this isn’t such a big deal in a place like say Canada, where it’s easier to get foreign workers into the country to fix this because they would all most likely speak English. However Korean is not a popular language outside of Korea. Getting in foreign workers as a temporary fix also comes with the challenge of teaching them about the culture, language, customs etc. It’s not as easy.
TLDR: This could cripple a lot of Asian countries if not dealt with.