The number of babies born in South Korea rebounded for the first time in nine years in 2024, welcome news for a country grappling with one of the the world’s most serious demographic crises.
But experts say it’s will be extremely difficult to address the country's demographic challenges as young people do not want to have to babies owing to a mix of factors that make it difficult to raise them in this brutally competitive, fast-changing country.
It said the country’s fertility rate — the average number of babies born to each woman in their reproductive years — was 0.75 in 2024, up from 0.72 in 2023.
Park Hyun Jung, a senior official at the Statistics Korea, said that her agency assessed the increase in births was partly attributable to an increase in marriages among couples who delayed weddings during the COVID-19 pandemic period.
South Korea’s statistics agency said Wednesday that 238,300 babies were born last year, an increase of 8,300 from a year earlier.
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