Korea's Unborn Future

Korea’s birth rates have imploded and are now the lowest in the world. The main reason is that many Korean women are constrained to choose either career or family, while men have little choice but to become the family breadwinner. Inflexible working practices and gender-unequal sharing of caring responsibilities sharpen the career-family trade-off in Korea compared to most other OECD countries, despite a rapid expansion of family policies. As Korea has grown richer and women have gained more equal opportunities to men in education and labour markets, the sacrifice of career and income for each child has grown and pushed fertility to new lows. In previous decades, women responded by postponing childbearing and reducing the number of children, but almost all would eventually marry and have at least one child. Now they increasingly forego marriage and childbirth altogether. The constrained choices facing parents reduce the well-being of both men and women, making for lower GDP and tax revenue due to low female employment, and ageing creates labour market and public finance challenges. A recent uptick in marriages and births is most likely a temporary after-effect of the pandemic, but could conceivably be a trend shift following a recent working hour reduction cumulating with reforms implemented the past couple of decades to support working parents. However, a fertility revival will at best be slow and gradual until policies, gender norms and working practices taken together support a large majority of women to pursue career and family in tandem.