Korea's population to top 50 mil. mark Saturday

Korea's population is expected to surpass the 50 million mark over the weekend, making it the 26th country in the world to reach this figure, a government report said Friday.

The estimate by Statistics Korea showed the population hitting the landmark figure at 6:36 p.m. Saturday, with the number to go up gradually until it peaks at 52.16 million in 2030.

Afterwards, the population is projected to decrease steadily due to the country's low birth rate until it falls back below 50 million in 2045.

According to the state agency, Korea's total fertility rate (TFR) will stand at 1.23 from 2010 through 2015. TFR is the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime.

This is lower than 2.08 for the United States 1.46 for Germany and 1.42 for Japan, and a sharp reduction from 2.30 reached for the country in the 1980-1985 period.

The report, however, showed that while the overall population will move up for the time being, this process will be accompanied by a steady drop in people of working age. Such developments, it said, will lead to a slowdown in economic growth and spike welfare spending.

Reflecting this, the so-called elderly dependency rate, or the number of non-economically active senior citizens that must be supported by 100 economically active workers, will hit 57.7 people in 2040, from just 6.1 in 1980.

In the next 30 years, South Korea's working-age population, those between the ages of 15 and 64, will decrease by 7 million, while numbers for people over 65 will increase with advances in medicine and closer attention paid to health, extends the average life expectancy, it said.

"Only Japan and Germany will experience sharpers drops in people in the working age in the cited period," it said.

The agency, said that while the drop in population and people of working age is inevitable in the long run, a rise in births could slow down the process by more than 10 years.

It said if the TFR rises steadily and reaches 1.79 in 2060, from the forecast 1.42, the population will stay above the 50 million mark for 13 more years, with the onset of an aged society being pushed back by around 14 years.

The latest estimate, meanwhile, showed the global population hitting 7.05 billion on Saturday, up from 4.69 billion in 1983. This means Korea's population will make up 0.71 percent of the total.(Yonhap)