South Korea has once again shattered its own record for the world’s lowest fertility rate. According to the figures released by Statistics Korea on Wednesday, the fertility rate or the average number of expected babies per South Korean woman over her reproductive life, fell to 0.78 in 2022, down from 0.81 a year earlier, CNN reported.
Experts say the rate needs to be at least 2.1 to keep the country’s population stable at 52 million. While the birth rate in the South East Asian nation has been falling since 2015, it has recorded more deaths than births for the first time since 2020. In 2022, the country recorded about 249,000 births and 372,800 deaths.
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The fertility rate in the country first dropped to lower than one child per woman in 2018. In 2020, there was widespread alarm in South Korea when it recorded more deaths than births for the first time, a BBC report said.
The trend continues till now with experts believing that higher living costs, high real estate prices, the cost of education, greater economic anxiety and the impact of the Covid pandemic are some of the factors discouraging them from having children.
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Despite the country spending billions of dollars each year on childcare subsidies, the government has failed to reverse the falling birth rate. The government has spent 280 trillion won ($210bn) over the past 16 years to reverse the falling birth rate but has failed to achieve the expected results.
The plummeting birth rate has now stoked fears that a declining population could severely damage the South Korean economy, because of a workforce shortage.
