Bank of Korea Governor Kim Choong-soo yesterday stressed the need to ease immigration policy and bring more foreign workers to a country whose rapidly aging population poses a serious economic challenge.
Speaking to foreign journalists in Seoul, Kim said Asia’s fourth-largest economy needed to “embrace more migrant workers” in order to drive future growth.
“For instance, the US welcomes 1 million, even up to 2 million immigrants a year, which helps its demographics remain so young and maintain economic vitality,” Kim said.
After years of promoting family planning in a crowded country of 50 million, South Korea has a chronically low birth rate that will halve the size of its youth population by 2060 and decimate its workforce.
One obvious way out was the adoption of “more future-oriented and open immigration policies,” Kim said. “By doing so we will be able to utilize these workers ... in the right places of the economy and retain social vitality at the same time.”
By 2050, South Koreans aged 60 years or older will account for 39 percent of the population, up from 17 percent last year, data from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs show.
South Korea’s fertility rate — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — stood at just 1.01 in 2011, compared with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average of 1.71.
With South Koreans increasingly shunning low-paying manual jobs, Seoul in 2004 adopted legislation allowing companies to hire manual workers from 15 countries — mostly Southeast Asia. As of last year, more than 500,000 registered migrant workers — mostly from China and Southeast Asia — were working in the country.
Once an economic juggernaut that grew nearly 7 percent a year on average since the end of the Korean War in 1953, South Korea has in recent years entered a phase of more measured growth.
The economy is expected to grow 2.8 percent this year after expanding 2 percent last year, Kim said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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