South Korea boasts of its status as the world's 11th largest economy but it is generally considered a small country in terms of the level of social welfare schemes for its 48 million people.
The need in South Korea to improve its family care support system is most evident in workplaces where working mothers are often forced to choose between work and family care.
In general, a Korean employee's dedication to his or her company is largely measured in proportion to the hours at work, leaving practically no room for flexibility for working mothers.
Such notion should change for further economic development, according to a senior official from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD).
"The whole idea of a flexible work system should not make a person (participating in the system) a lesser worker, which seems to be a sentiment found in South Korea," said Willem Adema, OECD's director for employment, labor and social affairs, in an interview
with Yonhap News Agency earlier this week .
Adema, who was in Seoul for a seminar, stressed that such thought "has to be embedded into the system and employees as well as employers."
"A lot of workers and colleagues still expect women to resign from the workforce either upon marriage or on child birth," Adema said, highlighting the lack of corporate family care support that causes a drop in childbirth.
South Korea's fertility rate -- the average number of babies that women aged 15-49 give birth to during her lifetime -- stood at 1.13 in 2006, the lowest in the OECD, of which it is a member. It compares with the OECD's 2005 average of 1.56. The average was 2.05 for the United States, 1.92 for France and 1.25 for Japan the same year.
"Korea is among the top countries in the OECD with people who have university degrees. There are many qualified people, of whom women are developed as good as men," Adema said. "The irony of this is that, over the years, companies tell the half of the population to make a choice, due to their lack of family care support."
"In an economic perspective, it doesn't make sense," he said.
While there may be no great pressure at the moment for companies to introduce better family care support for their employees, such as day care centers and flexible working hours, the aging of the overall population would require, in the end, women to stay in the workforce, the Dutch economist said.
South Korean companies with more than 300 female workers, or a total workforce of 500 or more, are required by law to operate daycare facilities, but only 20 percent of them were found to have complied with the law as of the end of 2006, according to the latest Labor Ministry report.
"Aging of the population may trigger a change in attitude among many employers, because they're running out of high skilled workers as the population ages," Adema said.
South Korea officially recognized itself as an "aging society" in 2000, when the ratio of its population aged 65 or older exceeded 7 percent. The figure is expected to double by 2018.
Adema also said South Korea's seniority-based promotion system is an obstacle to implementing flexible work systems.
"For whatever reasons, taking some time off for child care means you'll get punished because you'll never catch up in that system. So in order to give working mothers a fairer chance, you have to be more performance-based, rather than seniority-based." he said.
"As long as people are still scared to say to their bosses, for example, 'I'm pregnant and need to take six months off,' the country's birth rate is to remain lower," he said.
The state-run think tank Korea Development Institute warned in a recent report that South Korea's potential economic growth rate could fall to the 2 percent range in the 2020s if the low birth rate persists.