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North and South Korea have adopted different approaches to dealing with their falling birth rates and impending population decline.
North Korea’s fertility rate, or number of children expected per woman’s lifetime, is 1.78 births per woman, according to projections by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). South Korea is at 0.72, the lowest in the world.
During a speech at the communist country’s annual National Congress of Mothers in December, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called on women to stop the trend and raise children to “carry our revolution.”
Kim Won Jin/AFP via Getty Images
North Korea does not regularly publish such figures, so analysts rely on estimates based on past official birth records, censuses and indirect surveys. These include family birth data, age-specific fertility rates, and birth histories from the period 1993-2014.
“In the absence of additional, more recent empirical data, the following figures included in World Population Prospects 2024 are projections based on levels and trends for previous years,” Patrick Gerland, head of the Estimates Section of Population and Projections of the UN Population Division, he said. Newsweek.
A survey of more than 13,000 households conducted by North Korea’s statistics office in 2014 revealed a fertility rate of 1.78, continuing the downward trend that has been underway since around 2008, when the rate of fertility of the country was estimated at 2.1 – the minimum necessary to sustain. a population
Earlier this month, Radio Free Asia (RFA) cited anonymous North Korean sources who shared examples of authorities punishing doctors for performing secret abortions in Ryanggang, a northern province bordering to China.
Traders selling contraceptives have also been swept up in a crackdown, with those found to be dealing in birth control drugs facing heavy fines and lifetime bans from the market.
North Korea, with a population of 26 million, is not alone in changing demographics, and its fertility rate is higher than Russia (1.4), Japan (1.2) , China (1.0) and South Korea, and many of the developed countries. world for that.
Yet international sanctions have deprived North Korea of much advanced machinery, so the country is more dependent on manual labor and less prepared to compensate for a shrinking workforce through automation, the East Asia analyst said. Khang Vu wrote in a May article for the Lowy Institute.
Instead of implementing the broad economic reforms needed to improve living conditions and encourage larger families, the Kim regime has “increasingly cracked down on the black market and tightened state control to root out ‘anti-socialist’ behavior.”
Meanwhile, South Korea continues to struggle to curb its birth rate, despite allocating $300 billion over the past 18 years to initiatives aimed at increasing fertility.
President Yoon Suk-yeol’s government has also established a new ministry that will address this and other key demographic concerns, including aging, immigration and housing.
Additional strategies include matchmaking events with monetary rewards for couples who form relationships, along with policies aimed at reducing travel times and improving work-life balance.
However, these efforts have so far shown limited success. Young South Koreans, especially in the Seoul metropolitan area with its sky-high real estate prices, face substantial financial barriers to starting families.
Additionally, changing cultural norms have led many millennials and Gen Z individuals to prioritize their careers and personal freedoms over traditional family life, contributing to the country’s declining marriage and birth rates.
A recent report from The Wall Street Journal presented the trend in detail, revealing that dog strollers outsold baby strollers on a major South Korean e-commerce site last year for the first time.