Like Japan, South Korea also suffering from low birth rates, average age of resident to hit 50 by 2045
It is not only Japan that is the developed country in Asia with a ticking population time bomb. South Korea also has the same problem of lack of new babies being born, while more residents are ageing. Latest report says that the average age of South Koreans could go up to 50 in the next three decades.
If that rate of birth continues, South Korea could be extinct by 2750, reports Business Insider. The cause of the population imbalance is also the lack of interest of young South Koreans in sex, or to be specific, to procreate.
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South Korea is one of seven countries listed by Tech Insider with ticking population time bombs that residents need to reverse by having sex. Besides South Korea, other countries on the list at Denmark, Russia, Japan, Romania, Singapore and surprisingly, India, or at least the country’s Parsis community.
In South Korea, to encourage couples to have more children and bump up the country’s 1.25 children per woman fertility rate, lights are closed at 7 pm every third Wednesday of the month in offices for the residents to observe “Family Day.” There are also cash incentives for South Koreans to bear more kids.
To further reverse the country’s population problem, Global Aging Institute President Richard Jackson says Seoul needs to put in place a fundamental change in the workplace and gender dynamics. These are policies that would help both genders balance jobs and having children, Jackson writes in “The Graying of the Great Powers.”
Career women are not encouraged to have kids because doing so would mean they have to spend time taking care of young children five times as much hours as men do, data from the Korea Labour Institute say. On the other hand, men, who also spend so much time at work – since South Korea has the third-longest hours of OECD nations – go out with the team and drink after work hours, leaving them no time to help the wife at home.
Among the solutions proposed by Jackson are for South Korea to have a nanny state like in France and Sweden, flexible working hours like in the US and laxer immigration policies to tap Chinese and Filipino women willing to marry South Korean men. Actually, the country is moving in that direction with the growth of mixed ethnic families by 700 percent in 2014 from 2006. If the intermarriage with foreign women continues, South Korea is expected to have 10 percent of its population who are born to foreign mothers from the current 2 percent.
