South Korea’s fertility rate – already the lowest in the world – has fallen yet again, amid fears of “national extinction”, an ongoing debate about how to reverse the trend, and how the country’s work culture and gender relations could be to blame.

• Data from Statistics Korea showed that there had been an 8-percent decline in the country’s fertility rate in 2023 compared with the previous year.
• Experts have said that the country’s population of 51 million may halve by 2100 based on current rates.
• South Korea’s government has been spending billions of dollars to try and reverse the trend, as the population continues to shrink.
• The average number of babies a South Korean woman is expected to give birth to during her life fell to 0.72 from 0.78 in 2022, and previous projections estimate that this will fall even further, to 0.68 in 2024.
• These levels are far below the 2.1 children needed to maintain a country’s population at its current level.