A woman and a child ride a bicycle past street market stalls in Seoul on Oct 1, 2021. (Anthony WALLACE / AFP)
South Korea is expected to surpass Japan and become the world's most aged country in 2044, recent data showed, raising alarm for the country as well as the rest of the world that a global fertility bust is coming.
The proportion of people aged 65 or older in South Korea will likely reach 17.5 percent of the total population this year and rise to 36.7 percent in 2044, outstripping that of Japan
The proportion of people aged 65 or older will likely reach 17.5 percent of the total population this year and rise to 36.7 percent in 2044, outstripping that of Japan, which is at 36.5 percent, said South Korea's national statistics agency Statistics Korea in a report on Monday.
Given South Korea's low fertility rate of 0.81 births per woman, it is not surprising as the South Korean population had already been on a downward trajectory since last year. Tokyo has seen a population decrease over the past 11 consecutive years.
The report also raised alarm on a wider problem. Though the world population is still growing, a majority of the world's developed and developing countries are facing declining birthrates.
Globally, fertility rates are used to measure the average number of babies a woman is projected to have over her lifetime.
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Falling fertility rate
The total fertility rate has fallen markedly over recent decades in many countries, according to the World Fertility and Family Planning 2020 report released by the United Nations.
It has resulted in almost half of all people globally living in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1, and the global fertility rate declined from 3.2 live births per woman in 1990 to 2.5 in 2019, the report said.
Even places with the highest fertility levels are also seeing a decline. Sub-Saharan Africa sees its fertility rate fall from 6.3 births per woman in 1990 to 4.6 in 2019.
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Another study, conducted by researchers from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in 2020, showed that women in 1950 had an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. But in 2017, the global fertility rate dropped to 2.4.