Foreigners account for 2.8% of population

By Yoon Ja-young

Foreigners now account for 2.8 percent of the nation’s population, with half of them being Chinese including ethnic Korean-Chinese.

According to the 2016 Population and Housing Census released by Statistics Korea, Thursday, the country’s population stood at 51.3 million, up 0.4 percent from a year ago. It increased 1.76 times from 50 years ago when the recorded population was 29.19 million.

Among the population today, 25.7 million are males while 25.57 million are females. Nearly half of them live in Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province.

The population of Busan stood at 3.44 million, or 6.7 percent of the total, and South Gyeongsang Province had 6.5 percent.

Sejong, an administrative city built 130 kilometers south of Seoul, saw an 18.8 percent increase in population from the previous year, while Jeju saw a 2.9 percent increase. The population of Seoul, meanwhile, decreased by 1 percent, while that of Busan and Daegu dropped 0.2 percent each.

The number of senior citizens aged 65 or older stood at 6.78 million, surpassing the number of young people under 15. While the number of young people dropped 2 percent from the previous year, the number of senior citizens increased 3.1 percent, reflecting the aging of the society.

Foreign residents

There are 1.41 million foreigners residing in Korea as of 2016, 50,000 more than the previous year. Six out of 10 live in Gyeonggi Province, Seoul and Incheon.

Among them, 50 percent are Chinese, including ethnic Korean-Chinese. The percentage of Vietnamese stood at 9.4, followed by Thais at 5.8 percent, and Americans and Filipinos, each accounting for 3.7 percent.

By ages, 16.9 percent were aged between 25 and 29, followed by those between 30 and 34 at 15.1 percent, and those between 20 and 24 at 10.8 percent.

The number of households totaled 19.84 million, up 1.4 percent from the previous year. Among them, 460,000 were composed of only foreigners, up 5.5 percent from 2015.

Single-person households surge

The most typical households were single-person at 5.398 million, up 194,000 from a year earlier.

Single-person households took up 27.9 percent of the total, up from 27.2 percent. In the 1990s, four-member households were the norm.

Households composed of two people took up 26.2 percent, followed by three people at 21.4 percent and four at 18.3 percent.

The ratio of households with four or more members dropped 0.7 percentage points from a year ago. The average number of members of a household was 2.51, down 0.02 from the previous year.

The number of houses, meanwhile, totaled 16.69 million, up 2 percent from the previous year.

Among them, 10.03 million, or 60.1 percent were apartments. The ratio of apartments has been rising continuously since 1990 when they took up 22.6 percent. Each apartment had 75 square meters of space, on average.

The ratio of empty houses stood at 6.7 percent, up 0.2 percentage points from 2015.

There were 316,000 multicultural households based on marriage between Korean and foreign spouses, up 5.6 percent from 2015. One third of the foreign spouses were ethnic Korean-Chinese, followed by Vietnamese at 20.9 percent, and Chinese at 20.2 percent.