South Korea’s birthrate rose for a second straight year last year, government data showed yesterday, in a further sign that a country facing a demographic crisis for nearly a decade might be starting to turn a corner.
South Korea’s total fertility rate, the average number of babies a woman is expected to have during her reproductive life, stood at 0.8 last year, up from 0.75 in 2024, preliminary data from the South Korean Ministry of Data and Statistics showed.
New births began rebounding in 2024 on a post-COVID-19-pandemic boost and government policies, after eight consecutive years of declines that saw South Korea register the world’s lowest birthrate at 0.72 in 2023, a period marked by skyrocketing house prices and higher economic participation by women.
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There were five new births per 1,000 people last year, up from 4.7 in 2024. That compared with 4.6 in Taiwan last year, 5.6 in China last year and 5.7 in Japan in 2024, where the trend remains downward.
The pace of the rebound is faster than the government’s optimistic-case projection of 0.75 for last year and 0.8 for this year, which forecasts the total fertility rate to break above 1 per woman in 2031.
Marriages, a leading indicator of new births with a lag of one to two years, rose 8.1 percent last year, after a record 14.8 percent jump in 2024.
“The biggest part is that marriages are increasing a lot, accumulatively,” ministry official Park Hyun-jung told a briefing, citing a higher number of people in their 30s and shifts in social attitudes.
The sharpest rise in new births was in the capital, with Seoul’s fertility rate at 0.63, up 8.9 percent from 0.58 in 2024, although still the lowest across the country.
Hallym University sociology professor Shin Kyung-ah said the data needed more scrutiny because of statistical effects such as population composition changes.
“Still, it is meaningful as an indicator suggesting positive changes, which will, at least indirectly, also help make people become more positive about having a baby,” Shin said.
In a biennial government survey in 2024, 52.5 percent of South Koreans expressed positive views about marriage, up from 50.1 percent in 2022. The average number of children people ideally wanted to have stood at 1.89.
Last year, new births rose 6.8 percent to 254,457, the biggest percentage rise since 2007, while deaths rose 1.3 percent to 363,389, resulting in the population shrinking for the sixth consecutive year.
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