Abstract

On March 29, 2024, the South Korean President announced the launch of the Great Train Express, a high-speed rail service to reduce commuting times between Seoul and its suburbs. This initiative is part of fertility policies addressing South Korea's critically low fertility rate of 0.8 in 2021, the lowest among OECD countries. Despite numerous efforts since the 1980s, including the Fourth Basic Plan for Ageing Society and Population Policy, these measures have proven ineffective. Future policies must address gender inequalities, diversify family structures, and consider women's demographic profiles and marital status to effectively mitigate the low fertility rate challenge.

On March 29, 2024, the South Korean president announced the launch of the Great Train Express (GTX), a high-speed rail service designed to reduce commuting times between Seoul and its suburbs (“South Korea hopes”, 2024). Officials contend that this initiative will enhance the national fertility rate by enabling young people to reside in the suburbs and start families, despite the ongoing real estate crisis in the capital.

The GTX initiative underscores the South Korean government’s urgent response to a precipitous decline in fertility rates, which reached 0.8 nationally in 2021 (World Bank, n.d.) and 0.59 in Seoul in 2020 (“South Korea’s world lowest”, 2023), the lowest among OECD countries. This demographic trend accelerates population aging, raising substantial concerns regarding the escalating fiscal burden that public pensions and healthcare will impose on younger generations in the forthcoming years.

This infrastructural answer is to support the Fourth Basic Plan for Ageing Society and Population Policy (2021), the most recent suite of policies to combat low fertility. It aims to facilitate the reconciliation of career and family life in a context where women are often forced to choose between the two due to workplace gender inequalities and the broader Confucian patriarchal societal structure. Indeed, in a survey led by the Korean Population, Health and Welfare Association, 24.7% of the female respondents said “they were hesitant” to get married “because of ‘the culture of patriarchy and gender inequality.’”(Cho, 2021)

However, the impact of the GTX initiative remains limited and highlights the urgent need for the South Korean government to revise its fertility policy framework due to its inefficacy. Since the 1990s, most fertility-promoting policies have concentrated on structural support measures such as pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare services, alongside assistance with employment and housing for newlyweds.

Instead of focusing on the quantitative aspect of population growth, these policies should emphasize the qualitative side of the question by including (in the analysis of general demographic trends) the decline in fertility rates, the diversification of family structures, and advancements in women’s health. In that sense, it seems relevant to consider measures reducing delayed marriage and take into account the diversity of families to better address the low fertility rate.  

As women become more educated and engaged in economic activities, the marriage period and childbirth are significantly delayed, or even abandoned. This shift in the labor market has fueled the decline in fertility rate (Jeong et al., 2022), and women continue to navigate an unequal and patriarchal labor market where job conditions and opportunities hinder their ability to secure employment and start a family.

Indeed, gender inequalities are at the core of the low fertility rate. This is compounded by a trend among younger generations, in response to inequality and discrimination, to forgo parenthood due to financial concerns and perceived cultural pressures from fertility policies.

It can be partially explained by the fact that women find it hard to maintain job security and wages after returning from childcare. Despite the previous structural policies brought by the government, which mainly focused on the support during birth and after birth, the wage inequality and discrimination in the workplace make it harder for women to obtain wages equivalent to their male counterparts and positively evolve in their careers.  Indeed, South Korea has the highest proportion of late-middle-aged women engaged in temporary employment among OECD countries (Kim, 2024), a factor that exacerbates the gender wage gap in the country.

These inequalities belong to a greater system of discrimination based on a patriarchal societal organization and system of values in the peninsula. The educational policies brought by the government have appeared as one of the long-term core solutions to act on a low-fertility level. They notably focused on providing childbirth preparation, pregnant women’s classes, and other awareness-raising campaigns. However, they proved to be ineffective. They did not directly address gender inequalities in the workplace and at the societal level by tackling the social norms associated with these inequalities; an essential instance related to education is that school starts from the youngest age. South Korea, since the beginning of the 2000s, still remains the OECD country with the highest levels of gender inequalities and low fertility. These policies are indeed central in modifying the long-term gender-based discriminations and social values, nevertheless because of the urgency of the decline in fertility rate, these policies must be accompanied with direct answers brought into the workplace. 

As educational policies cannot be implemented alone to answer the question of low fertility in the short and long term, we must acknowledge the underestimated but existing positive effects of cash support and childcare services, which account for a significant portion of childbirth promotion policy (Jeong et al., 2022). Indeed, the Basic Plan for Low Fertility and Aging Society (2006) and the newly implemented Fourth Basic Plan for Ageing Society and Population Policy have encouraged young people to get married and have children. The development of a parental leave system illustrates efforts to address low fertility and aging trends by increasing the fertility rate and promoting women’s economic participation through comprehensive work-life balance measures. In 2011, the Moon administration amended the parental leave system by implementing regulations restricting weekly working hours to a maximum of fifty-two hours. In 2021, further adjustments were made, allowing parents to receive 80 percent of their regular salary for the initial three months of leave (capped at KRW 1.5 million) and 50 percent thereafter (capped at KRW 1.2 million) (Kim & Lundqvist, 2023).

Nevertheless, because of the “low fertility trap” (Jeong et al., 2022) South Korea fell into, the government must go further through a “customized approach” to fertility considering the hybridization of diverse life cycles; in other words, adapted to individual situations. Despite all these policies with a budget which has continuously increased from KRW 1.0 trillion in 2006 to KRW 42.9 trillion in 2021, South Korea in 2023 still remains the only OECD member with a national fertility rate of 0.72 in 2023 (Hamill-Stewart,2024). The South Korean government could look at the qualitative side of the question, notably by taking into consideration the drop in marriage rate, the demographic structure of women of reproductive age, the proportion of married women at each age, and the marital birth rate at each age group (Choi, 2022). These factors are central to address the fertility rate question. For instance, the crude marriage rate declined from 9 per thousand in the 1990s to 5 in 2018, signaling a significant decrease in the number of new marriages across the entire population, a factor even more significant in explaining this fertility decline among people aged between 15 and 29, as the marriage proportion falls dramatically for this group.

However, people still expect to have children in marriage, as cohabitation and children born out of wedlock are not very socially acceptable. Hybrid familial structures, encompassing both single-parent and non-marital unions, face discrimination due to their exclusion from comprehensive financial support stipulated by the aforementioned fertility policies. Consequently, such marginalization undermines the proclivity of hybrid families to engage in childbearing endeavors. Therefore, Korea should acknowledge the diversity of the types of families and act accordingly.

As South Korea is stuck in a low fertility trap, the government should change the paradigm of its fertility policies and adopt more specific policies addressing the circumstances of various families. Furthermore, the problem of low fertility rate is greatly dependent on the improvement of gender equality in the workplace and in social norms, as it would allow women to secure a job and start a family, and bring a new vision to the family model.