South Korea recorded a total fertility rate of 0.80 in 2025 (provisional), according to Statistics Korea. After a long decline, South Korean fertility rose slightly in 2024 and 2025. Japan shows 1.14 in 2025; the Chinese figure of 1.15 is not established in the national statement consulted. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the population declined in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
The essentials
- South Korea is at 0.80 in 2025; Japan is at 1.14; no official Chinese figure of 1.15 was found in the national statement consulted. Three major economies show fertility far below replacement level.
- A significant share of young adults in South Korea and Japan declare they do not want children, a choice that financial aid has not reversed.
- In 2025, Sweden shows fertility of 1.42 and France 1.56; levels higher than East Asia, associated with parental rights policies, childcare provision, and work flexibility.
- Very low and sustained fertility accelerates population aging; a fall in the number of women of childbearing age limits births at a given fertility rate, but the duration and scale of recovery depend also on age-specific rates, immigration, and policies.
- Accelerated aging poses significant funding challenges for public services and pensions, which current birth rates and ongoing labor reforms will not alone resolve.
A rate of 0.72: the structural effects of a critical demographic threshold
Birth bonuses generally do not remove the main constraints weighing on the decision to have children.
Seoul has been spending since 2006. South Korea has undertaken considerable investments in pro-natalist measures over two decades. The result: after falling to 0.72 in 2023, the rate rose to 0.75 in 2024 and then to 0.80 in 2025. For comparison, the generational replacement threshold stands at 2.1 children per woman. South Korea now stands at one-third of that level.
This figure deserves to be stated plainly before any analysis. At a constant fertility of 0.80, the theoretical size of the next generation would be approximately 62 percent smaller, or about 2.6 times as small, excluding other demographic factors. Very low fertility sharply reduces future cohorts over the long term, but it alone does not determine working-age population decline. The financing structures for pensions, hospitals, and public services rest on a base that shrinks faster than reforms can adapt.
Japan shows a provisional total fertility rate of 1.14 in 2025. A gap with South Korea that might seem reassuring, but which remains far from critical levels. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the population declined in 2023, 2024, and 2025. The Chinese population has fallen for three consecutive years.
Recent decline is extremely rapid in some East Asian countries, but earlier European falls were also very steep. French fertility dropped below 2.0 gradually, over several decades. The decline is approximately 0.4 children per woman between 2014 and 2025. This pace poses major adaptation challenges for institutions.
Financial aid addresses the wrong causes
Pro-natalist policies can target financial costs, but also childcare constraints, leave, equality, and work organization. If so, a birth bonus or housing aid can remove the barrier. But in Japan, national surveys show an increase in stated rejection of marriage and a decline in family aspirations. Some single people in the capital region believe children are necessary only after marriage. For the Korean baby bonus program studied, the estimated gains are limited at the aggregate level and mostly inframarginal; the effect of financial aid in Japan must be documented separately.
The financial aids studied have an estimated effect on births, but their observed level is insufficient to significantly modify aggregate fertility.
This distinction between constraint and preference appears central to analyzing current policies. Among the reasons cited by young adults in South Korea and Japan are work hours incompatible with parental presence, job insecurity that encourages postponement, the costs of raising and educating children constitute a major stated obstacle; the adequacy of a bonus depends on its amount and is not established here, and the risk of career slowdown or interruption, particularly for women.
Labor market structures, family policies, and care-sharing have more substantially eased the career-family trade-off in several Nordic countries than in South Korea and Japan. In South Korea, long hours, low flexibility, and work norms constitute major obstacles to reconciling career and children.
The obstacle is multidimensional: labor institutions, social norms, employment security, and costs or available income work together.
We can compare the situation of Korean women with that described in our analysis of female employment exposure in Asia-Pacific: in both cases, women disproportionately bear the costs of a labor market not designed for them.
Swedish and French family policies: parental rights, childcare, and work flexibility
In 2025, Sweden shows fertility of 1.42 and France 1.56. These figures fall short of replacement level; both series show recent downward trends and remain higher than what East Asia observes today. Differences in family policy may contribute to fertility gaps, notably through the nature of programs and their coordination with the labor market.
Both countries have invested in what labor economists call the institutional architecture of work-family conflict. In Sweden, parental leave is generous, individualized (part is reserved for each parent, non-transferable), and accompanied by a return to part-time work without career penalty. Public childcare covers nearly all needs from age twelve months. In France, subsidized childcare can facilitate both parents’ continued employment, with accessibility and cost varying by household and territory.
These programs change the calculations couples make. They facilitate reconciling employment and children, which can improve the viability of full-time parenthood for both parents. A birth bonus covers a one-time expense. A right to part-time work for both parents changes work norms for a generation.
France does not present a perfect model either: imposed part-time work remains a real and often invisible cost, and inequalities in childcare access persist between urban and rural areas. Global policies on leave, childcare provision, and family support are associated with better fertility outcomes, but it is not established that they alone explain French and Swedish levels or that monetary aid produced no effect.
The South Korean labor market as a case study
South Korea illustrates the mechanism with almost experimental precision. Korean companies have among the highest annual working hours among OECD member countries. The culture of presenteeism is documented: leaving before one’s hierarchical superior is socially penalizing in many sectors. Parental leave exists in law but its uptake by fathers remains low, partly from fear of professional consequences.
Therefore, a birth bonus acts on the child’s cost without changing how work is organized. The couple hesitating to have a child because no one can pick up the child from daycare at 6 p.m. will not be convinced by a check.
Labor reforms attempted since 2023 by the South Korean government—reducing mandatory overtime, expanding parental leave rights for men—point in the right direction. But they face deep cultural and economic resistance. South Korean SMEs, which employ the majority of workers, have insufficient margins to absorb a significant reduction in working hours without compensatory productivity gains. The problem of working time thus connects to economic structure.
Irreversible demographic effects over a generation’s horizon
Demographic dynamics obey particular inertia. Fertility below replacement reduces future cohorts; the scale of decline in women of childbearing age depends on duration, age-specific rates, and migration. If fertility rose after a prolonged period below replacement, births would remain affected in the medium term by the reduced number of women of childbearing age. This is what demographers call negative demographic momentum.
South Korea fell below a fertility rate of 1.0 in 2018. China approaches it. This means trajectories are heavily constrained by current age structure, but they are not independent of future developments in fertility, mortality, and migration. The 2024 WPP projections show marked aging and a contraction trajectory for the South Korean population.
If birth rates cannot be raised fast enough to avoid demographic imbalance, Asian governments must identify other levers, a perspective they rarely state explicitly.
Two complementary mechanisms exist. The first is immigration. Japan began relaxing migration rules from 2019, with modest but real results. South Korea debates the issue but remains politically divided. China, whose citizenship model is highly restrictive, has not taken this path.
Yet immigration of skilled workers can offset part of the working-age population deficit, but not all of it, and it generates its own integration challenges.
The second lever is productivity. An economy with fewer workers can finance its public services and pensions if each worker produces more. Automation, AI, and sector upgrading are partial responses. Japan has anticipated this trajectory: its investments in industrial robotics, among the highest in the world, partly respond to demographic constraint. South Korea follows a similar path in semiconductors and precision equipment.
But increased productivity and automation finance pensions only if gains are redistributed toward social contributions or taxation. This is a political choice, not a mechanical outcome. And this is precisely where the debate on work norms and taxation joins the demographic question in all its complexity. We touch here on the structural tension between tax base and productive capacity that several developed economies will have to resolve in the next decade.
The charges South Korea in 2050 will have to finance without the workers of 2025
Projections show a marked rise in the old-age dependency ratio, which will pose significant funding challenges to the South Korean pension system. Total retirement spending in South Korea is approximately 4.7 percent of GDP and public spending approximately 3.8 percent, far less than France (14 percent) or Japan (10 percent). But this low level reflects both a historically favorable age structure and a still-immature pension system, with limited benefits and coverage, which will turn around rapidly.
Available options are known: raise the retirement age, increase contributions, reduce benefits, or combine all three. None is popular. All require social debate that East Asian societies have not yet openly initiated.
China’s situation combines demographic contraction and economic slowdown. The growth model based on investment and industrial exports faces pressure from shrinking working-age population base.
For China as for South Korea, the demographic trajectory will bring major funding challenges for public services and pensions. Financing public services and pensions will require significant adjustments to contribution rates, retirement age, or benefit levels. The open question is whether reforms to work norms and migration policies will alter this trajectory, or whether East Asian societies will manage marked demographic aging in the decades ahead.
Sources
- UN World Population Prospects 2026, United Nations, Population Division: https://population.un.org/wpp/
- Springer China Population Development Studies 2025: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42379-025-00198-3
- CAINZ Research Institute, report on birth rates in Japan, 2025 (no direct link available; report cited in the Springer source above)
- OECD, data on annual working hours by country (OECD.Stat): https://stats.oecd.org/
