The new government program to lift Korea’s hopelessly low birthrate only shows it has yet to fully recognize the seriousness of the problem.
It’s a good thing that policymakers are shifting, if belatedly, the focus of supports from rearing children to bearing them, or even back to an earlier stage ― encouraging people to marry. It also makes sense that to create an environment for dating and marriage, the policy calls for providing more jobs for young people and increasing housing subsidies for newlyweds and soon-to-be-married couples.
Distressingly lacking in these steps, however, is the boldness that shows the policymakers’ determination. How many employers would hire workers even if the government gives them subsidies of 5 million won ($4,400) per person a year? And how many lovers would decide to tie the knot if the mortgage ceiling is raised by 20 million won or so?
It is almost a comedy that the policy package even calls for the government to arrange massive blind dates for young people. Has Korea gone several centuries back when matchmakers were needed to bridge people of marriageable age?
The government’s program illustrates how officials are slow to recognize the gravity of looming demographic catastrophe. Korea’s fertility rate ― the number of children a woman can expect to have during her lifetime ― now stands at 1.21, which is the lowest in the world except for such city states as Hong Kong and Macau. Unless it goes up to 2.1 where the population can replace itself, the nation will have to undergo drastic downsizing with its economy sharply shrunken.
The government’s short-term goal is to raise the rate to 1.5 by 2020, a tall order if past experience is any guide. Since 2006, the government has spent 120 trillion won to prevent the birthrate’s fall, but in vain. It is long past time for Korea to perceive the demographic problem as a national crisis and work out more fundamental and longer-term plans to stave off the declining birth rate.
Foreign examples indicate the nation should start with campaigns for greater gender equality. Only when women feel bearing and rearing children makes as much economic sense as the uninterrupted pursuit of jobs and careers, can the fertility rate go up. That means Korea ― especially Korean men ― should agree to eliminate all discriminatory practices against women in both workplaces and within families. In Britain and France where husbands see wives as equal wage earners, the fertility rate rose in proportion to the women’s employment rate. But the situation has changed little in Germany and Italy where men regard women as subordinate breadwinners.
The nation should also change its labor market to let a larger number of aged people continue to work, and implement a far bolder immigration policy to make the most of guest workers.
Raising the fertility rate requires little less than national remodeling, which entails introducing new divisions of labor between gender and generations as well as between locals and foreigners. That in turn shows the current five-year program led by a few Cabinet ministers would go nowhere. Compare this with Japan, which has activated a blue-ribbon committee directly under the prime minister’s office and set up a 20-year plan to maintain the population above 100 million.
If Korea wastes another five years or so, its future will be bleak.