* The text below may differ from the actual broadcast content, so please check the broadcast for more accurate information. Please indicate [ YTN News Lounge] when quoting .
◇Anchor> The total fertility rate is about 2 for men and women to meet and give birth and maintain the population. To be precise, they say you have to maintain about 2.1, but that’s the level to maintain the population. If it is lower than that, it may be an abnormal signal, but as you said, about 1.6 is considered a borderline. Because Korea is already lower than 1. It seems like it’s been a long time since the red light came on.
Let’s look at the trend of our total fertility rate. If you look at the trend over the past 20 years in the 2000s, there were sections that fluctuated between 1.09 and 1.3 people. Then, at some point, it started to decline rapidly. How is it? Please explain.
◆Lee Sang-rim> Korea’s total fertility rate continues to fall키톤벳. It has been falling since the 1960s, but I think it was in 2001 and 2002 that the current crisis situation was revealed. In 2001, 600,000 births will collapse and 500,000 will collapse. What happened at this time is that as society collapsed due to the IMF economic crisis, the safety of the system decreased, and young people began to avoid marriage and childbirth. Then, this low birth rate began to appear.
After that, it bottoms out in 2005 and then continues to fluctuate. But as you said, from 2016, the fertility rate continued to drop for no particular reason, dropping to 0.78 today.
◇Anchor> Around 2016, it started to drop noticeably. So, what happened around 2016? Even taking into account the gestation period, isn’t it possible that there have been changes in social and economic conditions since 2015 and prior to 2013? What variables are you focusing on?
◆Lee Sang-rim> Now, the issue has been attracting attention recently. From 2005 to 2015, the fertility rate rose for about 3 years and then fell for about 3 years. There are many theories about it. First of all, house prices started to rise rapidly, and the rental price also skyrocketed. And in terms of population movement, a lot of young people tended to migrate from the metropolitan area to the provinces due to the local balance policy until then. It disappears, and the metropolitan concentration rises sharply again. And even if you are married, the period when you start not having children suddenly becomes extreme from 2015 and 2016.
◇Anchor> It’s appearing on the screen now, but is this a coincidence? Or maybe we should look more empirically to see what kind of causal relationship there is. It was at that point that apartment prices showed signs of starting to soar again after 2015. As I mentioned earlier, the total fertility rate began to fall sharply again from 2015 to 2016. Isn’t there a clear situation, isn’t there a relationship? Intuitively it doesn’t seem that way.
◆Lee Sang-rim> It is very difficult to verify empirically, but when I interview young people, I feel that perceptions change very rapidly from around that time. In particular, despite soaring housing prices, government authorities tried to stimulate and boost the real estate economy. At the same time, I think it’s time to think that it’s difficult to buy a house anymore with the earned income of young people and give up. And since then, as SNS spreads, the consumption culture has also grown.
The important thing is that there has been a very big structural change in the perception of young people. Nevertheless, the policy did not follow that and began to look at the youth from the standpoint of the older generation in the form of interpreting it only as a matter of cost and continuing to support it as in the past. We are paying attention very belatedly to the change in the structural perception of young people.