South Korea, the country with the world’s lowest birth rate, expects it to fall even further in the next two years while its overall population is expected to plummet to levels not seen since the 1970s.
The new data underscores the demographic timebomb that South Korea and other East Asian nations like Japan and Singapore are facing as their societies rapidly age just a few decades after their dramatic industrialization.
South Korea’s total fertility rate, the number of births from a woman in her lifetime, is now expected to drop from 0.78 in 2022 to 0.65 in 2025, according to the government’s Statistics Korea.
On top of what @friend_of_satan said, countries will not be able to keep up with their current productivity on top of the aged out work-force. This means their GDP will fall severely.
This is a really big deal for most of the world economically and we’ve already passed the point where we could mitigate it.