Low Birthrate Threatens South Korea Economy, Governor Kim Says
BLOOMBERG: ….South Korea will face “a very big obstacle to our growth” unless families have more babies, Gyeonggi Governor Kim said in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. The government needs to be “more active” in providing child care and lowering families’ education cost, he said.
Women with careers, who tend “not to marry and not to have children,” have added to this “difficult” issue, said Kim, the third-most-favored candidate from the ruling Grand National Party for next presidential election, according to a Realmeter poll this month. Gyeonggi province has introduced incentives for encouraging government employees to have more children, Kim said.
South Korea’s fertility rate was 1.21 per woman in the last five years — the fourth-lowest in the world, according to United Nations data… (more)
EDITOR: This is quite an irony for the Watchdog’s generation, some of whom were declining to have children due to fear of over population. Because of work of a menial nature performed in 1959 as a graduate student in economics for Professor Carlo Cipolla, one of the original researchers of the “Demographic Gap”, the Watchdog was among the first to presage the drop in birth rates that occurs now in advanced industrial nations whereby reproduction rates are less than the 2.1 child per woman required to maintain a stable population.
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