À̹ÌÁö È®´ë Demographic crisis becomes more and more of a reality for South Korea with little signs of improvement on the birth front with the fertility rate slipping below the replacement level and couples increasingly opting not to have any child at all, government data showed.
According to data from the Statistics Korea, couples married between 2005 and 2009 want to have an average of 1.91 children in their lifetime, below the replacement threshold of 2.1 to keep the population stable. From 1950 to 1954, the average was 4.49.
Worse, the data underscored the growing trend in young Korean couples choosing to stay childless. About 5.9 percent of couples married between 2000 and 2004 remained childless, a sharp increase of an average of 2 percent until the mid-1990s. Some 8.2 percent of couples married between 2010 and 2015 did not wish to have children, an all-time high in the share.
By Lee Yu-sup and Choi Mira
[¨Ï Pulse by Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]