South Korea bets on parental leave and gender equality to reverse historic drop in birth rate
In May, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced plans to establish a government ministry that would address a growing “national emergency” — the notoriously low number of births.
In response to the exorbitant cost of housing, education and long work hours, Yoon promised to increase parental leave allowances, extend parents’ time off, institute flexible work schedules and alleviate educational difficulties faced by parents.
The decision followed the release in February of data indicating that South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world — the average number of children a woman will have during her reproductive life. For 2022, Statistics Korea reported a rate of 0.78 — or 78 babies for every 100 women. This number fell to 0.72 in 2023, and previous projections estimated an even sharper drop — to 0.68 — in 2024.
Not counting immigration, countries depend on a fertility rate of 2.1 to support a stable number of inhabitants — a rate three times higher than this year’s fertility projection in South Korea.
“The concern with the very low and prolonged fertility rate is the aging population, which may not have enough resources to care for it as the active workforce declines,” says Megan Huchko, an obstetrician-gynecologist and director of the Center for Global Reproductive Health at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Why South Korea’s birth rate is so low
Huchko believes several factors are driving the record low rate. Among them are the competitive workforce, combined with the largest gender pay gap among the 38 countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. South Korean women reportedly decide not to have children based not only on pay disparities at work, but also on the country’s notoriously long work week, the difficulty in finding affordable housing, especially in Seoul, and the declining marriage rate. The long working hours in many South Korean jobs represent a barrier to balancing child-rearing and employment.
“There are some relatively unique restrictions on procreation in South Korea,” says Jennifer Sciubba, president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit focused on improving global well-being through health-based policies. evidence. For example, she notes, “education is prohibitively expensive, which disincentivizes having large families.”
Although South Korea offers parental leave, Sciubba says few men and women take advantage of it because of employer expectations in a pressurized work culture. Few births occur outside of marriage, she adds, so the declining marriage rate depresses procreation.
Some commentators link South Korea’s birth trends to a radical feminist movement, believed to have its origins in 2019. Proponents of the 4B (or Four No’s) movement reject four traditional norms — dating men, seeking marriage, having sex with men and have children. The movement has amassed about 3,400 members on Naver, South Korea’s most popular online forum.
Births are also declining in other developed nations, including the United States, where the fertility rate has dropped to 1.62 babies per woman in 2023, a 2% decline from 2022. That’s another historic low, according to interim data released in April by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
However, “South Korea’s fertility rate is the lowest on the planet. That alone is enough to arouse anyone’s curiosity”, says Hugo Jales, associate professor of economics at Syracuse University, in the state of New York, who published an article in December 2021 in Journal of Asian Economics about South Korea’s baby bonus program. In examining the effects of this pro-natalist policy on fertility, Jales and his co-author found that more than 74% of the program’s disbursements went to births that would have been expected even without the monetary incentive.
A pro-natalist push
After abolishing antifertility policies in the late 1970s, South Korea didn’t implement any pronatalist policies until the new millennium, says Wookun Kim, assistant professor of economics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In 2001, local governments in South Korea began promoting a pro-natalist cash transfer policy aimed at families with newborns.
By 2012, such local policies had become “ubiquitous,” says Kim, who was born in South Korea. They were heavily promoted, raising awareness through public announcements, street signs, flyers and mailings, Kim notes in an upcoming article. of research in Journal of Human Resources.
Then, in 2024, the South Korean government planned to “expand childbirth incentives, paternity leave benefits, and housing assistance programs for families with newborns, as part of broader efforts to boost the birth rate in fall of the country”, according to the Korea Times.
Authorities expected the monthly payment to increase to 1 million won ($770) for families with children under 1 year old, and half that amount for those with babies between 1 and 2 years old.
“Most people are not in doubt about having one (or another) child. So getting someone who would otherwise choose not to have children to change their behavior will require big incentives,” Jales tells TGH. “The original baby bonus amounts were certainly far from changing most families’ fertility choices.”
So far, paid parental leave subsidies for working mothers have “increased conception and decreased contraception—an important mechanism for manipulating fertility,” according to a 2022 report on South Korea published in Review of Economics of the Household. As a result, the authors concluded that “paid parental leave for working women confers some positive benefits.”
Many other countries have implemented pro-natalist policies “to mitigate the adverse effect of aging,” the report notes. These policies, which have become more common globally—and also exist in Canada, Hungary, Japan, Poland, and the United States—offer benefits such as increases in maternity leave, child tax credits, and subsidies for child care. UN data indicated that 28% of nations had pro-natalist policies in 2015, almost double the 15% they had in 2001.
Pro-natalist resistance
While pro-natalist policies may seem favorable to women and couples, they are only aimed at producing children without providing adequate long-term care, says Sarah Barnes, director of the maternal health initiative at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank. , DC, chartered by Congress. “Research shows that the impact is short-lived and ultimately does not tend to increase the number of children a woman has, but may impact the timing at which she has a child or children,” she says.
Another disadvantage stems from a tendency to craft pro-natalist strategies without seeking input from women, says Heather Barr, associate director for women’s rights at Human Rights Watch, an international nongovernmental organization based in New York. Short-term financial incentives seem unlikely to have a broad impact on people’s decision-making on major life-long issues, such as whether to continue working and whether a partner should participate in childcare.
Policies focused on gender equality and improving women’s lives through education and employment would be more successful than pro-natalist efforts.
“It is striking that fertility rates appear especially low in countries where women have relatively strong access to education, employment opportunities (although there are large gender inequalities in the workplace) and contraception, but continue to face very deep levels of inequality gender,” says Barr. This includes caregiving expectations and discriminatory treatment of mothers.
The gender gap in unpaid care work is much greater in South Korea than in many other countries, with women dedicating an average of 54 minutes a day to unpaid care for children or the elderly, while men dedicate just 17 minutes.
To further compound the enigma, there is a low fertility rate combined with one of the highest life expectancies in the world (83.8 years). As a result, maintaining the same level of retirement benefits per worker will cost the government much more than it did in previous generations, Jales says.
“For now, South Korea’s fertility rate continues to fall, while the older population grows,” concludes Jales.
With information from Think Global Health*
Source: https://www.ocafezinho.com/2024/11/27/o-plano-da-coreia-do-sul-para-evitar-um-colapso-populacional/
