South Korea has broken its own record for the world’s lowest fertility rate, according to official figures released Wednesday, as the country struggles to reverse its years-long trend of declining births.
The country’s fertility rate, which indicates the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime, sunk to 0.81 in 2021 — 0.03% lower than the previous year, according to government-run Statistics Korea.
To put that into perspective, the 2021 fertility rate was 1.6 in the United States and 1.3 in Japan, which also saw its lowest rate on record last year. In some African countries, where fertility rates are the highest in the world, the figure is 5 or 6.
South Korea’s birth rate has been dropping since 2015, and in 2020 the country recorded more deaths than births for the first time — meaning the number of inhabitants shrank, in what’s called a “population death cross.”
And as fertility rates drop, South Korean women are also having babies later in life. The average age of women that gave birth in 2021 was 33.4 — 0.2 years older than the previous year, according to the statistics agency.