North and South Korea have used different approaches to deal with falling birth rates and declining populations.
North Korea’s fertility rate, or the number of babies 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 “look forward to our revolution.”
Kim Won Jin/AFP via Getty Images
North Korea does not regularly publish these figures, so analysts rely on estimates based on official birth records, censuses and indirect surveys. It includes data from household births, age-specific fertility rates, and birth histories from the period 1993-2014.
“In the absence of additional, more recent empirical data, the figures included in the World Population Prospects 2024 are projections based on levels and trends in previous years,” said Patrick Gerland, chief of the Population Estimates and Projections Section of the UN Population Division, toward Newsweek.
A survey of more than 13,000 households conducted by North Korea’s statistics bureau in 2014 revealed a fertility rate of 1.78, continuing a steady downward trend since 2008, when the country’s fertility rate was estimated at 2.1—the minimum required to maintain it. a population.
Earlier this month, Radio Free Asia (RFA) cited an anonymous North Korean source who shared an example of authorities punishing doctors for performing clandestine abortions in Ryanggang, a northern province bordering China.
Traders selling contraceptives have also reportedly been swept up in the crackdown, with those found to have the birth control drugs facing heavy fines and lifetime bans from the market.
North Korea, with a population of 26 million, is not alone in facing a changing demographic, and its fertility rate is higher than that of Russia (1.4), Japan (1.2), China (1.0), and South Korea, and many developed countries. the world for that matter.
But international sanctions have deprived North Korea of ​​advanced machinery, making the country more dependent on manual labor and less prepared to compensate for the declining workforce through automation, East Asia analyst Khang Vu wrote in a May article for the Lowy Institute.
Instead of implementing the economic reforms necessary to improve living conditions and encourage larger families, the Kim regime has “increased the crackdown on the black market and tightened state controls to crack down on ‘anti-socialist’ behavior.”
Meanwhile, South Korea continues to struggle to reverse its declining birth rate, despite spending $300 billion over the past 18 years on initiatives to boost fertility.
President Yoon Suk-yeol’s government has even created a new ministry that will deal with this and other demographic issues, including aging, immigration and housing.
Additional strategies include matchmaking events with monetary rewards for couples who form relationships, along with policies aimed at reducing commuting times and improving work-life balance.
However, these efforts have so far shown limited success. Younger South Koreans, especially in the Seoul Metropolitan Area with very high real estate prices, face financial barriers to starting a family.
In addition, changing cultural norms have led many millennials and Gen Z to prioritize career and personal freedom over traditional family life, leading to declining marriage and birth rates in the country.
A new report from The Wall Street Journal presents the trend in detail, announcing that dog strollers surpassed baby strollers on South Korea’s leading e-commerce site last year for the first time.
