Why South Korea Can’t Seem to Convince People to Have Babies
Minjee Kim (PPS ‘25)
South Korea broke the world record again — and no, I’m not referring to the boy band BTS’s 31 billion Spotify streams. South Korea’s birth rate dropped from 0.81 to 0.78 in the past year, breaking its own record for lowest birth rate in the world. The country’s low fertility rate, however, is the symptom, not the problem. South Koreans are having fewer babies because most working Koreans barely have enough time and money to care for themselves, let alone a family.
The average South Korean spends 1910 hours each year working, outranking all but four other OECD countries. Although the government limits the work week to 40 hours (and an additional 12 hours of paid overtime), in reality, informal norms in the workplace pressure employees to stay longer. It is taboo for subordinates to leave the office before their bosses, and workers are often expected to eat dinner and drink with their team after work hours. Given that the average Korean spends close to two hours in transit every day, by the time they return from the office, they have to get ready for bed in order to wake up early for work the next day. If both parents are working, how would they make time in the day to care for their child?
In a country where hundreds work themselves to death every year, starting a family is beginning to sound more and more like an unattainable luxury. Despite working longer hours than most OECD countries, the average household in South Korea only has around $25,000 in disposable income, lower than the OECD average of $30,490. Less South Koreans are getting married in the first place. Facing a tough job and housing market as the country’s economy struggles to recover from the aftershocks of the pandemic, many millennial and Gen Z Koreans are hesitant about marriage and children.
If material limitations are what’s behind the declining birth rate, the solution may seem apparent — can’t the government just provide more benefits to support child-rearing parents, maybe subsidize daycare or schooling for children of two-income households? South Korea, unfortunately, has already been doing that for years to no avail. The government has tried, in a whole host of ways, to raise their birth rate. During the past two decades, they’ve thrown $200 billion at the problem in subsidies to child-rearing parents and families. They’ve given sizable monthly allowances for both parents of newborns and for children up to the age of 7. The government even created public daycares to make early childhood care more accessible to low-income families, but all their efforts still have not been enough. South Korea is the most expensive country to raise a child in, from the moment they are born until they turn 18, yet most of the government’s direct cash benefits are limited to early childhood. Less programs are available in late adolescence, which is when private education costs start to spiral for many families.
Subsidies alone are not going to make South Korea’s low fertility problem go away. We need to focus on treating the underlying causes, not the symptoms, of South Korea’s low fertility rate and improve South Koreans’ work-life balance. The government’s efforts in the labor space thus far have been in the wrong direction — recently, President Yoon’s administration faced a lot of pushback from the public when they tried to increase the maximum work hours from 52 hours to 69 hours per week. Thankfully, the proposal to lift the cap on work hours has been shut down. We should instead be cutting down on work hours or, at the very least, enforcing work hour limits that already exist. Research has shown that people should not be working over 50 hours per week, or else they may be at a higher risk for cardiovascular diseases, depression, anxiety, and many other physical and mental health issues. Reduced work weeks have also been shown to reduce burnout by allowing people to better take care of themselves and cultivate stronger relationships with their loved ones.
South Korea’s most immediate problem is not its decreasing birth rate and population. The government needs to come to terms with the fact that their people aren’t having children because South Korea is becoming unlivable for the average citizen. The first step is to give South Koreans more breathing room from their jobs. Until living conditions improve, convincing South Koreans to have children in a country many consider “hell” will prove to be a herculean task.
Minjee Kim (PPS ‘25) is from Seoul and is a Public Policy Undergraduate at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. This piece was submitted as an op-ed in the Spring ’23 PUBPOL 301 course. This content does not represent the official or unofficial views of the Sanford School, Polis, Duke University, or any entity or individual other than the author.
