South Korea, champion of the declining birth rate

Column by Sébastien Lechevalier, Professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and International Senior Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies (CIGS, Tokyo).

The causes of declining fertility among Korean women vary from generation to generation, reports Sébastien Lechevalier in his column.

Column. The falling birth rate affects most developed countries in East Asia and Europe, and is reflected in an accelerated ageing of the population. But it is in South Korea that the scale of the phenomenon is greatest: in 2021, the total fertility rate (the total number of children per woman of childbearing age) there will be 0.81, compared with 1.16 in China, 1.19 in Spain, 1.25 in Italy, 1.3 in Japan, 1.58 in Germany and 1.8 in France. Above all, this situation is sustainable: the fertility rate has been below 1.3 for two decades.

This is an essential point, as the decline in fertility in developed countries is often analyzed as resulting from the fact that women are tending to postpone the moment when they give birth, without however having fewer children than generations of previous decades.

The non-transitory nature of the Korean situation, on the other hand, seems to show that the average number of children per woman tends to fall sharply over the medium-long term, for a variety of successive reasons. This is shown by a study carried out on several generations of Korean women by Jisoo Hwang, Professor of Economics at Seoul National University ("Later, Fewer, None? Recent Trends in Cohort Fertility in South Korea", Demography n° 60/2, 2023).

The main result is to measure precisely the evolution of the causes of this low fertility. In short, the generation of women born in the 1960s marry but have fewer children than previous generations; this is followed by a generation with a much lower marriage rate; and, finally, the generation born in the 1980s is characterized by a greater number of childless women, even when they are married.

Education and housing costs

Another result concerns the impact of education level. Traditionally, more educated women have fewer children. But this is no longer the case in most advanced countries, where better-educated women are those who delay childbirth the most... without having fewer children as a result. South Korea, again, operates differently: it's the least-educated women and the most-educated women who have the lowest fertility rates!

Using a cohort approach, Jisoo Hwang, following in the spirit of the work of 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, deepens our understanding of changes in fertility by situating them in the socio-economic context of each generation. In short, the extreme situation in Korea can be explained in part by the extremely high costs of education and housing, but also by the worsening conditions of job stability and wages for some young people, who can no longer afford to start a family.

Two lessons emerge from these results.

The first is that the general downward trend in fertility in the most developed countries conceals differences between countries and between generations, as shown by the specificities of the Korean case.

The second is that these profound transformations imply that government subsidies for raising children or parental leave schemes are likely to have very limited effects on fertility, as demonstrated by the failure of natalist policies in Korea. In short, "demographic rearmament" cannot be decreed, if that expression has any meaning at all.