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February 26, 2025 | 11:42 am
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - South Korea's birth rate rose in 2024 for the first time in nine years, driven by an increase in marriages, preliminary data showed on Wednesday, February 26, 2025.
As reported by Reuters, this is a sign that the country's demographic crisis may be starting to ease.
The country's fertility rate, the average number of babies expected to be born to a woman over her reproductive lifetime, reached 0.75 in 2024, according to the South Korean Statistics Office.
In 2023, the birth rate dropped for eight consecutive years to 0.72, the lowest in the world, from 1.24 in 2015. This raised concerns about the economic shock to South Korean society very rapidly.
Since 2018, South Korea has been the only member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with a birth rate below 1.
South Korea has launched various measures to encourage young people to marry and have children. This is since President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has now been impeached, declared a "national demographic crisis". He also plans to create a new ministry dedicated to addressing the low birth rate.
"There was a change in social value, with more positive views about marriage and childbirth," said Park Hyun-jung, an official at the South Korean Statistics Office, in a briefing, also citing the impact of the increase in the number of people in their early thirties and the postponement of the pandemic.
"It is difficult to measure how much each factor contributed to the rise in new births, but they themselves had an impact on each other too," Park said.
Marriage, a key indicator of new births, surged 14.9 percent in 2024, the largest spike since data began to be released in 1970. The increase in the marriage rate appeared for the first time in 11 years in 2023, with a 1 percent increase supported by post-pandemic encouragement.
In Asian countries, there is a high correlation between marriage and childbirth, with a gap of one or two years, as marriage is often seen as a prerequisite for having children.
Nationally, last year's birth rate was the lowest in the capital, Seoul, at 0.58.
The latest data also shows that there were over 120,000 more deaths in South Korea last year than there were births, marking the fifth consecutive year of natural population decline. The administrative city of Sejong is the only major center where the population is growing.
South Korea's population, which peaked at 51.83 million in 2020, is estimated to shrink to 36.22 million by 2072, according to the latest projections by the statistics agency.
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