Lee shifts focus from birthrate to quality of life with Korea's new population strategy

President Lee Jae Myung underscored that Korea’s population policy is a “critical task which the nation’s very destiny hinges upon” as the government unveiled its new five-year national population strategy aiming to recalibrate the social structure to encompass issues such as depopulation, migration and AI-driven changes.

The new strategy aims to raise the youth employment rate to 50 percent and lower the senior poverty rate to 30 percent by 2030, moving beyond a previous focus on boosting the country’s dismally low birthrates to improving the quality of life from birth to death.

“We are at a pivotal moment to fundamentally reshape the structure and landscape of Korea's population policy,” Lee said as he presided over a meeting of the Presidential Committee on Population Policy at the Blue House in central Seoul. “The population policy we aim to shape must encompass labor, welfare, employment, housing and education policies alike.”

“Issues of quantitative growth, such as birthrates and population size, remain important,” Lee said. “However, I believe we now need a major shift in population policy toward pursuing qualitative growth. Ultimately, this implies a fundamental redesign of Korea’s entire socioeconomic system to align with demographic changes.”

The committee announced the first basic plan for “national population strategy” after the Presidential Committee on Ageing Society and Population Policy was expanded and reorganized into the new panel one month ago.

Under this plan, the government did not set a specific target for the total fertility rate, a departure from the previous Yoon Suk Yeol administration’s target of 1 per woman by 2030 and the Park Geun-hye government’s 1.5.

Lee welcomed a rebound in births over the last two years, but acknowledged that “the population issue is a multifaceted societal problem stemming from an environment where individuals bear the sole responsibility for child rearing, anxiety about the future and the inequality arising from opportunities concentrated among a select few.”

Between January and July, 170,079 babies were born in Korea, up 14.7 percent from a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Data and Statistics, in keeping with a recent upward trend. 

Through the plan, the government set a core objective of improving the quality of life for the people and ensuring social sustainability as it comprehensively addresses key challenges, including the low birthrate, an aging population, regional depopulation, technological innovation and the diversification of family structure.

The government outlined 117 core tasks and seven challenge tasks across four major areas, covering areas such as expanded public housing for youths and a redesigned basic child allowance.

The plan underscores three core strategies — mitigation, adaptation and leaping forward — to slow the pace of demographic change, restructure systems to suit a decreasing population and boost productivity through technological innovation.

It details 10 key policy tasks across supporting the trajectories of young people's lives, ensuring dignity for older adults, realizing a capability-based society driven by technological innovation and establishing a mutual-growth system for an open society. The next five years are seen as a critical window for responding to demographic shifts.

Key objectives were set around life satisfaction and economic activity participation rates rather than birth-related metrics such as the total fertility rate.

"The total fertility rate is a figure with significant repercussions,” Kim Jin-oh, vice chairman of the population strategy committee, said in a briefing on the plan. "We wanted to avoid setting a numerical goal because doing so could place a burden on everyone, particularly those who wish to get married and have children."

Initiatives include expanding housing and financial support tailored to each life stage, such as supplying 571,000 public housing units for youths, newlyweds and child rearing households and a 10 million won ($7,500) grant with the birth of a first child. 

Plans are also underway to introduce a grant of up to 20 million won for expecting parents, new child care allowances for self-employed individuals and freelancers and the removal of the "out-of-wedlock" designation from birth registration documents. The government plans to introduce a flexible system that allows employees to choose arrangements suited to their personal circumstances, provided companies establish systems tailored to their related industries or job requirements.

Other plans include easing income requirements for policy loans for newlyweds and more opportunities for large families to apply for public housing.

The idea is to move away from a quantitative approach focused solely on increasing the number of births to prioritizing the improvement of individual quality of life and ensuring social sustainability amidst a shrinking population.

As for the metrics in play, the government set goals to raise the life satisfaction score of 6.6 points last year to 7 on a 10-point scale by 2030 and to increase the economic participation rate from 71.8 percent to 74 percent.

It aims to increase the youth employment rate by 5 percentage points, from 45 percent last year to 50 percent by 2030. It further envisions cutting the career interruption rate for women aged 30 to 44 in half, reducing it from 20 percent to 10 percent.

Ensuring income security for older adults was another key objective, and the government aims to lower the senior poverty rate, which stood at 35.9 percent in 2024, by 5.9 percentage points to 30 percent by 2030. It also aims to reduce the suicide rate among older adults from 37.9 percent to 26.5 percent per 100,000 people.

The plan will train young professional caregivers to meet the rising demand for assistance in an aging population while simultaneously creating new job opportunities for younger adults. The initiative aims to address both the shortage of care workers and youth unemployment by creating jobs that involve the use of AI, robots and assistive devices.

Introducing a birth registration system for foreign-national children born in Korea is also being considered, as are plans to attract more global talent and expand settlement opportunities for migrants

The government has plans for an integrated "K-care" system to unify care services, currently fragmented across ministries and regions, for children and older adults, train young professionals in the care sector and expand opportunities for long-term settlement for migrants.

The government will introduce a demographic impact-forecasting system to periodically publish projections of demographic shifts by sector and industry, along with analyses of their potential impacts.

The master plan will be finalized at a future Cabinet meeting after gathering feedback and making necessary revisions.

BY SARAH KIM [[email protected]]