North and South Korea have adopted different approaches to confronting their falling birth rates and looming population decline.
North Korea’s fertility rate, or the number of babies expected per woman’s lifetime, stands at 1.78 births per woman, according to projections by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). South Korea’s stands 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 appealed to women to stop the trend and raise children to “carry forward our revolution.”
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North Korea does not regularly publish such figures, so analysts rely on estimates based on past official birth records, censuses and indirect surveys. These include data from household births, age-specific fertility rates, and birth histories from the 1993-2014 period.
“In the absence of additional, more recent empirical data, figures afterward included in World Population Prospects 2024 are projections based on levels and trends for previous years,” Patrick Gerland, chief of the Population Estimates and Projection Section of the UN Population Division, told 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 the downward trend that has been ongoing since about 2008, when the country’s fertility rate was estimated to be 2.1—the minimum needed to sustain a population.
Earlier this month, Radio Free Asia (RFA) cited anonymous North Korean sources who shared examples of authorities punishing doctors for performing secret abortions in Ryanggang, a northern province bordering China.
Merchants selling contraceptives have also reportedly been swept up in a crackdown, with those discovered dealing birth control drugs facing heavy fines and lifetime bans from the marketplace.
North Korea, with a population of 26 million, is not alone as it faces shifting demographics, and its fertility rate is higher than Russia (1.4), Japan (1.2), China (1.0), and South Korea, and much of the developed world for that matter.
Yet international sanctions have deprived North Korea of much advanced machinery, so the country depends more on physical labor and is less prepared to offset a dwindling workforce through automation, East Asia analyst Khang Vu wrote in a May article for the Lowy Institute.
Instead of implementing the sweeping economic reforms necessary to improve living conditions and encourage larger families, Kim’s regime has “increasingly cracked down on the black market and tightened state control to root out ‘anti-socialist’ behavior.”
Meanwhile, South Korea continues to struggle to put the brakes on its plummeting birth rate, despite having allocated $300 billion over the last 18 years in initiatives aimed at increasing fertility.
President Yoon Suk-yeol’s government is even establishing a new ministry that will address this and other key demographic concerns, including aging, immigration and housing.
Additional strategies include matchmaking events with monetary rewards for couples who form relationships, along with policies aimed at reducing commute 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 its sky-high real estate prices, face substantial financial obstacles to starting families.
Additionally, shifting cultural norms have led many millennials and Gen Z individuals to prioritize their careers and personal freedoms over traditional family life, contributing to the country’s declining marriage and birth rates.
A recent report from The Wall Street Journal presented the trend in stark detail, revealing that dog strollers outsold baby strollers on a major South Korean e-commerce site last year for the first time.