한국 출산율 사상 처음 0.6명대 진입, 해법은?

Hello and welcome to Within the Frame, I’m your new host, in Seoul.
South Korea’s birthrate, the lowest in the world, continues its downward spiral, shattering its own records.
The rates are so low that it’s sparking stark warnings from academia and institutions across the globe, with major foreign news outlets dissecting reasons why Korean women aren’t having babies.
Korea is on track for serious economic consequences if the low rates are left unresolved. What’s continuing to drive down the numbers and what more should be done to reverse the decline?
For some clues, we’ve invited two special guests today. HWANG Myung-Jin, Professor of Public Administration at Korea University now joins us via zoom. Also joining us tonight from Milan is Francesco BILLARI, Professor of Demography and Rector of the Bocconi University.


(HWANG) Q1. South Korea’s total fertility rate, the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, plunged to 0.65 in the fourth quarter of last year.
Statistics Korea projects the annual fertility rate to drop further to 0.6 this year.
What does the figure 0.6 entail?

(BILLARI) Q2. Korea saw an increase in the number of marriages after the Covid-19 pandemic technically shifted to an endemic, and the Korean government is pinning hopes that the rise could help improve the country’s bleak birthrate figures.
Then could the rapid plunge in total fertility rate to the 0.6 range be a temporary phenomenon?

(BILLARI) Q3. Italy also faces a long-standing demographic crisis, with the number of births continuing to head for a new record low.
According to Italy’s national statistics bureau ISTAT, births fell 1.7% to 393-thousand in 2022, hitting the lowest since the country's unification in 1861.
What are the main causes driving the numbers down in Italy?

(HWANG) Q4. We’ve been discussing the reasons behind Korea's crawling birthrate a lot, analyzing from diverse angles.
And some of the main culprits for the drastic drop in figures include, heavy workload and long working hours, soaring education expenses and gender inequality imposing much heavier burden on women in and outside of their homes.
Let’s talk more about this, and what calls for the most urgent attention?

(HWANG) Q5. Let’s talk a little bit about countermeasures. The Korean government has injected a staggering 380 trillion won, or roughly 284 billion dollars over the past 17 years, but it did little to lift the crawling figures.
And what’s quite odd is that the budgetary support for areas directly linked to birth and childcare rather decreased, according to the National Assembly’s budget committee.
What’s happening? We wanna get your thoughts on this.

(BILLARI) Q6. One of the Korean government’s countermeasures to tackle the country’s plunging birthrate is boosting after school care programs to alleviate the burden on working parents.
The programs were available in the past, but they’ll be further be extended and diversified to cater to working parents’ specific needs.
In your point of view, how effective would this be?
What can we learn from other advanced nations in Europe that took a similar path to tackle the issue?

(HWANG) Q7. The government is also showering parents with cash, hoping it would have an immediate effect in encouraging more households to have kids.
But many remain skeptical that money alone will not fix the country’s fertility woes.
Tell us more about these cash payouts, and your thoughts on their effects.

(BILLARI) Q8. Italy plans to spend over one billion euros on new initiatives to encourage Italian women to have more babies.
The package includes various tax incentives, exemption from social security contributions and more support for nurseries all of this for women that have two children or more.
How is this plan coming along, and would it be effective in reversing Italy’s low figures?

(HWANG) Q9. Childcare leave is another important dimension for working parents, but Korea largely remains conservative about it.
Fresh efforts are being made, but according to Statistics Korea, only about 30% of working parents actually took childcare leave in 2022.
And the figure dips much lower, when it comes to paternity leave.
What more needs to be done to make full use of the leave system...

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2024-03-05, 18:30 (KST)