SEOUL: Declining birth rates continue to be a major concern for South Korean authorities as the nation recorded a 6.5 per cent drop in February compared with the year before.
Government data released on Tuesday underscored the low birth rate that plagued the country’s economy for more than a decade.
The data compiled by Statistics Korea showed that 22,854 infants were born in February, compared with 25,772 tallied in the same month of 2019.
According to Yonhap News, this marks the lowest number of newborns for any February since the statistics agency started compiling monthly data on newborns in 1981.
In the first two months of this year, 49,672 babies were born in South Korea, also down 6.1 per cent from a year ago.
South Korea’s total fertility rate hit an all-time low last year, a clear sign of its population decline down the road.
The country’s fertility rate, which referred to the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime, was 0.92 last year, down from 0.98 a year earlier.
Last year marked the second consecutive year for the rate to fall below one. South Korea was the only member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that had a total fertility rate below one.
Last year’s figure was far below the replacement level of 2.1 that would keep South Korea’s population stable at 51 million. It was also a sharp drop from the 4.53 in 1970, when the government began to compile related data.
The crude birth rate the number of births per 1,000 people per year also came to a new low of 5.9 last year, down from the previous year’s 6.4.