South Korea has recorded record growth in the birth rate in the first five months of the year, officials at AFP said on Wednesday.
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“The number of newborns for the January-May period amounted to 106,048, a growth of 6.9 %, the highest growth rate since the start of the collection of this data in 1981,” said an official of the Korean Statistics Office.
This increase follows the first annual increase in the number of births in South Korea for more than ten years, carried by an increase in marriages.
In 2024, the number of births increased by 8,300, or 3.6 %, to 238,300 compared to the previous year.
The month of April has particularly increased, with annual growth reaching 8.7 % and a total of 20,717 births that month.
“This increase is attributable to the increase in the number of women in their thirties, leading to an overall increase in marriages,” the manager told AFP.
“In South Korea, there is a strong correlation between marriage and birth, which stimulated births in the first five months,” he added.
The last figure marks a reversal marked compared to 2024, when the number of births for the period from January to May had dropped by 2.7 % compared to the previous year.
The fertility rate for May amounted to 0.75.
The country needs a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman to maintain its population of 51 million inhabitants.
At the current rates, the population will be almost half reduced, increased to 26.8 million by 2100, according to the Institute of metrics and health assessment of the University of Washington in Seattle.
According to experts, the reasons for the low birth rate are multiple: high costs in children’s education, real estate price, a notorious competitive company which makes it difficult to obtain well -remunerated jobs, among others.
