The latest demographic projection released by the national statistics office last week warns of a sharp reduction in the country’s workforce in the coming decades.
Due to the rapid aging of the population and the low birthrate, the number of people aged 15-64, which stood at 35.98 million in 2010, is forecast to decline to 32.89 million in 2030 and 28.87 million in 2040 after peaking at 37.04 million in 2016.
The number of working-age people is estimated to further drop to 21.87 million in 2060, accounting for less than half the population. By then, working-age people will have to support the same number of elderly persons and children.
This decrease pace is the third-fastest in the world, behind Japan and Germany. The expected shrinkage of the workforce is cited as a main factor in many predictions that Korea’s growth potential will continue to fall from the current level of 3.4 percent in the coming decades. A recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated it would slip to 1 percent by 2031, the lowest among its 34 member states except for Luxemburg.
To prevent this gloomy outlook from becoming a reality, Korea is in an urgent need of increasing its fertility rate and boosting the economic activity of senior citizens and women.
The most immediate and efficient way to shore up the depleting workforce would be to encourage more women to work, as it takes time for the fertility rate rise to increase the number of workers, and senior workers are more limited in their productivity.
Korean women are the best educated in the world but their participation in economic activity lags far behind women in other advanced nations.
The proportion of Korean high school girls entering university jumped from 31.9 percent in 1990 to 80.5 percent in 2010, compared with 73 percent in the U.S., 70 percent in Sweden and 60 percent in the U.K., according to a recent OECD report.
Over the same period, the ratio of Korean women engaged in economic activity increased by a mere 4.6 percent to 54.5 percent, far below 76 percent in Sweden, 70 percent in the U.K. and 69 percent in the U.S.
Local research institutes estimate that increasing the proportion of economically active women in the country to the OECD average would lead to boosting its growth potential by an extra 2 percentage points.
In order to encourage more women to join the workforce, comprehensive measures are needed to support the balance between work and family and help foster family-friendly corporate cultures and social environments.
The burden on working women is reflected in the figures from Statistics Korea, which showed that nearly 20 percent of married women aged 15-64, more than half of them in their 30s, quit work after they married, became pregnant or gave birth.
Men are required to shoulder more domestic responsibility and become true partners with their wives.
