Jung Min-ho has worked as a staff writer at The Korea Times since 2012, mostly covering social and political issues. He currently belongs to the Politics & City Desk where he covers topics such as health, labor and human rights. Prior to joining the team, he was responsible for covering North Korea and sports. His article about a biosecurity breach of Middle East respiratory syndrome won him an award from the Korea Science Journalists Association in 2016. He is also the co-author of the book, "Medical Pioneers of Korea" (2019). He served as the head of the international relations committee at the Journalists Association of Korea from 2021 to 2023.
Experts warn of 'bubble' population targets in noncapital regions
Experts attend a discussion session during a seminar on Korea's demographic crisis in noncapital regions, in Seoul, Wednesday. Courtesy of Korean Peninsula Population Institute for Future
By Jung Min-ho
Overestimated headcounts fuel wasteful projects in shrinking regions, study shows
Korea’s local governments have collectively overestimated their future populations by more than 6 million people, creating what researchers call “bubble” population targets that drive wasteful infrastructure spending.
Ahead of the June 3 local elections, experts gathered Wednesday for a seminar on the country’s demographic crisis and called on politicians and policymakers to abandon “inflated growth assumptions” and redesign their policies around realistic population data.
During the event, think tank Korean Peninsula Population Institute for Future unveiled a nationwide analysis of population figures embedded in municipalities’ plans. The research found that 119 of them — 96 percent of the sample — had overestimated their future population.
The average gap between planned and actual figures was 21.9 percent, it found. While the actual resident registration count stood at 39.7 million, the combined planned population reached 46.16 million, leaving roughly 6.46 million “extra” people on paper.
“That’s because those population figures serve as a baseline for planning local infrastructure and for securing central government funding and budget allocations. As a result, many local governments have routinely inflated them and continued to overestimate their populations in various ways,” said Yoo Hye-jung, director of the think tank’s population research center.
“What we need now is an entirely new framework for population planning that correctly fits a shrinking society.”
She suggested that regions with a relatively healthy population size and age structure should focus on “qualitative upgrades” in childcare, education and housing.
By contrast, she said areas with both shrinking and rapidly ageing population should prioritize consolidating facilities, strengthening social safety nets to guarantee a minimum standard of living and making better use of “relationship populations,” which refers to those who no longer reside in a certain region but keep ties to the area due to family, work or leisure.
Her remarks fed into a broader debate at the seminar over how to redesign Korea’s growth model as the population shrinks.
Another main presenter, Choi Ji-min of the state-funded Korea Research Institute for Local Administration, explained the Lee administration’s “five poles, three specials” blueprint, which seeks to move beyond a Seoul‑centric model by fostering four additional megacities across the country.
Instead of 226 basic municipalities competing for their own industrial park or university campus, she said, the plan would reorganize Korea into a small number of wide‑area regions where core cities, surrounding towns and rural counties share functions and infrastructure as a single unit more effectively and sustainably.
Choi said the success of such a shift will ultimately depend on whether the next generation of local leaders is willing to coordinate across jurisdictions and accept differentiated roles, rather than promising “everything everywhere” to voters.
“We need to move away from a single, Seoul‑centered growth pole and build a multi‑core, mutually reinforcing national structure in which each city and region develops its distinctive industrial, cultural and environmental strengths,” she said.
According to government data, the resident population of the greater Seoul region stood at 26.01 million as of December 2023, accounting for 50.7 percent of the population, with its share rising for five consecutive years since first exceeding the halfway mark in 2019.
The Bank of Korea’s 2023 economic outlook report estimated that if Korea’s degree of urban population concentration were reduced to the OECD average, the nation’s total fertility rate could rise by 0.41.