Roving Periscope: “National extinction” fears worry China, Japan, South Korea, and more…

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: Imagine China, the world’s most populous country until November 2023, reporting no new birth at all in two months of 2024… a South Korean businessman offering USD 75,000 as a bonus to each of his workers for producing a kid…and Japan is worried about its increasingly emptying roads…

For, population, statisticians say, is inversely proportional to the prosperity that comes with urbanization and industrialization. Simplified, poor people tend to produce more children to enhance their per capita income. The richer ones, however, believe children have become “unaffordable,” because of a variety of factors, the chief being their inability to cut expenses that come with every child they produce.

The worst-affected country right now is South Korea whose fertility rate, already the lowest in the world, has fallen yet again, amid fears of “national extinction.”

Data showed on Wednesday an 8 percent decline in the country’s fertility rate in 2023 compared with 2022. Experts said South Korea’s current population of 51 million may halve by the year 2100 if the decline persists.

Data showed on Wednesday an 8-percent decline in the country’s fertility rate in 2023 compared with the previous year.
As the Asian economic giant gears up to head to the polls in April, its political parties have focused on population decline in their campaigns, while the current government has promised to come up with “extraordinary measures” to tackle the situation. The root cause behind the country’s declining fertility rate included challenges around employment, housing, and childcare.

Seoul has already spent more than 360 trillion won (USD 270 billion) in areas such as childcare subsidies since 2006, and parents are given a cash payment of two million won (USD 1,510) upon the birth of a child. Recently, the billionaire owner of a construction company offered a bonus of USD 75,000 each to his workers if they produced a child!

For many South Korean women, however, a workaholic culture and ultra-competitive pressure in the workspace means that taking time out to have a baby is too much of a risk, in a country that already has one of the worst gender pay gaps in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).

Most couples are simply not interested in becoming parents because of the high financial burdens it brings with childbirth.
Other countries in Asia are also struggling with declining birth rates.

In neighboring China and Japan, fertility rates hit record lows of 1.09 and 1.26 respectively in 2022.

Japan had more than twice as many deaths as new babies in 2023, while the country faces growing labor shortages.
In 2023, nearly 9.02 million babies were born in China, compared to 17.86 million in 2016. The decline has been steep.

In 2022, China’s population declined for the first time since 1961, and it is only expected to worsen in the upcoming years. To curb the negative effects of an aging population, Beijing decided in 2013 to gradually relax the so one-child policy, which had been in effect since 1979 to check the population boom.

From 2016, parents were allowed to have two children. But it did not change the situation much. The number of births slightly increased from 2014 onwards, but then started to fall again in 2018. In November 2023, India overtook China as the most populous country in the world—as the next Asian giant candidate to face population decline as soon as it joins the club of the top three world economies.

Chinese society is aging rapidly and facing a serious demographic shift towards older age groups. The median age of the country’s population has increased massively from about 18 years in 1970 to 36 years in 2015 and is projected to rise continuously until 2080.

In 2010, around 13 percent of the Chinese were above 60 years and older. And by 2060, nearly 42 percent of the Chinese will be senior citizens.

This shift in demographic development will increase the social and elderly support expenditure of society as a whole. One measure of this social imbalance is the old-age dependency ratio, measuring the relationship between economically dependent older age groups and the working-age population. The old-age dependency ratio in China is expected to soar to 66 percent in 2060, implying that by then three working-age persons will have to support two elderly persons.