Fertility fall in korea?
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Rapid Fertility Fall in Korea and its Prospects
--- A Beaten Track to Mare's Nest? ---
Hung-Tak Lee
professor of sociology
College of Social Sciences
e-mail: htlee@hufs.ac.kr
I. Magnitude of fertility change in the post-1990 Korea
The demographers who have been accustomed to gradual and long-drawn-out demographic transitions in the late 19th-century Western Europe would find Korea's fertility change both breath-taking and incomprehensible. To wit, it took France some 77 years (1832-1909) to lower her birth rate from the 30 level to the 20 level, and for both Sweden and Switzerland it took 42 years (1880-1922) to complete the same demographic transition process. However, for Korea it took only 20 years (1970-1990) to lower her birth rate from the 30 to the 20 level.
Directly or indirectly, effects of this rapid fall in the birth rate were spilt over to the contours of the post-1990 fertility change in Korea. The proviso, "indirectly," is here inserted since more often than not the birth rate and the fertility level do not jibe with each other. Table 1 sets out the age-specific fertility and the total fertility rate (TFR) changes for the 1992-2001 period generated on the basis of the vital registration data of the individual years.
Table 1. Trends in age-specific fertility rate (ASFR) and total fertility rates (TFR)
year ASFR TFR
15-19 20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 40-44 45-49
1992 4.7 82.8 188.9 65.1 12.6 1.8 0.2 1.78
1993 4.4 72.7 178.8 64.2 13.8 2.0 0.2 1.67
1994 4.0 66.0 179.6 68.0 14.7 2.2 0.2 1.67
1995 3.6 62.9 177.1 69.6 15.2 2.3 0.2 1.65
1996 3.3 58.8 167.6 71.1 15.5 2.4 0.2 1.58
1997 3.1 54.5 161.5 73.2 16.0 2.5 0.2 1.54
1998 2.9 48.0 153.4 73.2 15.8 2.5 0.2 1.47
1999 2.6 43.5 148.1 72.9 15.4 2.4 0.2 1.42
2000 2.5 39.0 150.6 84.2 17.4 2.6 0.2 1.47
2001 2.2 31.6 130.1 78.3 17.2 2.5 0.2 1.30
data source: Korea National Statistical Office, Social Indicators of Korea, 2002, (Dec. 2002), p. 108, Table 1-13.
Reading down the individual columns of Table 1, one finds uninterrupted and drastic fall in age-specific fertility rate (ASFR) for the age categories 20-24 and 25-29, the two most fertile age categories that exert the strongest influence on the fertility change as a whole. For instance, the ASFR for the 20-24 age bracket shrank from 82.8 in 1992 to 31.6 in 2001. Again, for the 25-29 age group, the ASFR dropped from 188.9 in 1992 to 130.1 in 2001. Two factors may account for the consistent drop in the ASFR: the one being the increase in labor force participation among the unmarried female falling within the 20-29 age bracket and the other being recent tendency to postpone marriage as much as possible among the distaff aged 20-29 years, regardless of their labor force participation. It appears that for unmarried females in Korea the 20-29 age bracket is too precious a period to be wasted by getting married "too early."
However, if one checks the change in the ASFR for the 30-34 and 35-39 age brackets, one finds that most of those females who postponed marriages till the end of their twenties are hurriedly trying to make up for the lost time, resulting in a gradual ASFR increase from 1992 through 2001. Chances are that most of these late starters in childbearing would end up with one or two children at most. That is, the late starters' efforts to have at least one child before their menopause (never mind the possible increase in the number of those nulli-parae who would willingly or unwillingly forgo childbearing altogether) are too weak to offset the drastic fertility decline of those in the 20-29 age category for the corresponding 20-year period.
In fact, the fertility increase for the 30-39 female age category exercised virtually no effect on the TFR for the 1991-2001 period, as the TFR plunged from the 1.78 level in 1992 down to the 1.40 level in 2001, despite the "meagre" increase in the ASFR for the 30-39 age group. What makes us the more pessimistic about the future of Korea's fertility is a projection by Korea National Statistical Office (KNSO) (Kim, Kim 2002: 622, Table 18-4) on TFR and on the number of births expected for the individual years. In Table 2, one notices that Korea's TFR is expected to hover around the 1.37-1.40 level for the 2005-2035 period, a level too low to maintain the nation's population at the replacement level. Due to this low fertility, the number of births is projected to decrease from 532,000 in 2005 down to 420,000 in 2025 shortly after the nation's population reaches its zero growth point, and further down to 353,000 in 2035. The magnitude of the decline is astounding. Are we on a beaten track to mare's nest, or are we not?
Table 2. Projected TFR and number of births (2005-2035)
year TFR number of births (1,000)
2005 1.37 532
2010 1.36 503
2015 1.37 445
2020 1.37 424
2025 1.38 420
2030 1.39 388
2035 1.40 353
Obviously, one comes across a discrepancy between the TFR level of 1.37 for year 2005 in Table 2 and the TFR level of 1.30 for year 2001 in Table 1. This discrepancy has to do with the fact that the 2005 fertility data were projected on the basis of the census while the 2001 data were generated from the vital registration of the year in question. The projected TFR levels in Table 2 stand in stark contrast to those of low-fertility European countries for the period 1992-2000 in Table 3 (Piroux, 2002: 724).
Table 3. Trends in TFR for European countries (1992-2000)
country year
1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Germany 1.30 1.28 1.24 1.25 1.32 1.37 1.36 1.36 1.36
Austria 1.49 1.48 1.44 1.40 1.42 1.37 1.34 1.32 1.34
Belgium 1.65 1.61 1.56 1.55 1.59 1.60 1.59 1.61 1.66
Denmark 1.76 1.75 1.81 1.80 1.75 1.75 1.72 1.73 1.77
Spain 1.29 1.25 1.20 1.18 1.17 1.18 1.16 1.20 1.24
Finland 1.85 1.81 1.85 1.81 1.76 1.75 1.70 1.74 1.73
France 1.73 1.66 1.66 1.71 1.73 1.73 1.76 1.79 1.88
Greece 1.38 1.34 1.35 1.32 1.30 1.31 1.29 1.28 1.29
Ireland 2.02 1.93 1.86 1.87 1.90 1.92 1.93 1.88 1.89
Italy 1.31 1.27 1.22 1.20 1.19 1.20 1.20 1.23 1.23
Luxemburg 1.67 1.69 1.72 1.69 1.76 1.71 1.68 1.73 1.79
Netherlands 1.59 1.57 1.57 1.53 1.53 1.56 1.63 1.65 1.72
Portugal 1.55 1.52 1.44 1.40 1.44 1.46 1.46 1.47 1.50
Britain 1.79 1.76 1.74 1.71 1.73 1.72 1.71 1.68 1.65
Sweden 2.09 1.99 1.88 1.73 1.60 1.52 1.50 1.50 1.54
Norway 1.89 1.86 1.87 1.87 1.89 1.86 1.81 1.84 1.85
Switzerland 1.58 1.51 1.49 1.48 1.50 1.48 1.47 1.48 1.50
Comparing the TFR data for Korea in Table 1 and those for European countries in Table 3, one does notice that, except for the TFR decline in Germany, Austria, Spain, Greece, and Italy for the 1992-2000, the TFR decline in Korea for the years 1992 through 2001 was far steeper than the fertility decline observed in the European countries for the similar period. This out-Europeanizing of Europeans forebodes ill for Korea's demographic future, since the consistent and "almost abrupt" fertility decline in the last one decade is certain to rob Korea's future economy of "a demographic bonanza" or "demographic gift" (Casterline et al, 2001: 21-22) that would be generated as a result of up-surge in the relative size of the working-age population following fertility increase. Let us examine in detail what the demographic future holds for Korea.
II. Bleak future and negative population growth
1) Changes in absolute female population
A KNSO population projection based on the year 2000 census indicates that the nation's population is expected to decrease from 48,460,590 in 2005 down to 44,336,997 in 2050. That is, the population will keep on increasing up to year 2023 when it reaches a plateau of 50,683,490, but the population negative growth will start shortly thereafter. One may here question the wisdom of following too closely the KNSO population projection, since the projection may or may not translate into reality in the near and far future, as most demographers are well aware of. Various assumptions, more than anything else, a valid fertility assumption, serve a lynch-pin for both short-term and long-range projections. Put another way, accurate baseline data are critical to producing "accurate population projections (O'Neill et al, 2001: 223-228).
Referring to the reliability of population projection results, T. H. Marshall once quibbled that we know "....darn well.... Nature does not, as a rule, imitate the ballet dancer, who springs accurately through the air and lands in perfect equilibrium. She is more likely, under the influence of a severe shock, to oscillate like a drunkard steering for a lamppost." Bearing in mind the caveat T. H. Marshall noted, let us examine the expected change in female population by age bracket for the coming 50 years. The data in Table 4 set out the demographic and tectonic change Korea's future fertile female population would be subject to.
Table 4. Projected changes in female population by five-year age group (2005-2050)
year female population projected population
15-19 20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 growth rate(%)
2005 1,463,159 1,839,285 1,853,472 2,114,476 2,064,711 0.52
2010 1,613,646 1,450,963 1,829,232 1,848,508 2,108,591 0.38
2015 1,502,491 1,600,499 1,443,133 1,824,841 1,844,031 0.18
2020 1,299,805 1,490,370 1,592,177 1,439,849 1,820,540 0.04
2025 1,207,578 1,289,453 1,482,812 1,588,788 1,436,853 -0.08
2030 1,116,977 1,198,043 1,282,966 1,479,767 1,585,739 -0.24
2035 1,009,252 1,108,176 1,192,068 1,280,384 1,476,861 -0.44
2040 994,762 1,001,362 1,102,727 1,189,735 1,277,968 -0.64
2045 958,202 987,039 996,457 1,100,639 1,187,628 -0.86
2050 874,910 950,781 982,245 994,610 1,098,733 -1.04
source: KNSO population projection
In Table 4, except for the unusual bulge of the 1990-1995 female birth cohort, or the secondary spill-over effect of the Korean War baby boom cohort (refer to the figure in Appendix I at the end of the paper), the female population in the child-bearing age continues to decline from 2005 down to 2050. For instance, the female population in the 20-24 age bracket is projected to be halved from 1,838,285 in 2005 to 950,781 in 2050. Again, the female population in the prime child-bearing age of 25-29 age category is also expected to decrease much more drastically from 1,853,472 in 2005 down to 982,245 in 2050. Still further decrease is expected for the 30-34 age group, and for the 35-39 age group as well, for the corresponding period, and the effects of the decreasing number of female population in the fertile age category get translated into a steep fall in the yearly number of births shown in Table 2.
The data in Table 4 clearly show that the low fertility level that Korea is expected to sustain throughout the 2005-2050 period would have to do not so much with the ever decreasing number of children the individual couple would have as with the ever shrinking absolute number of female population, with the exception of the 1990-1995 birth cohort, in their fertile age category during the period. To make matters still worse, chances are that for the projected period, among the fertile female population, the share of those remaining single throughout their entire lives would be on the increase. If the female demographic data in Table 4 provide any guide, Korea is on the road to a pillar-shape population pyramid, with the bean-pole family household structure predominating.
Given the projected population pyramid, with the post-Korean War baby-boom cohort entering its pensionable age category in the mid-2020's, one can easily predict the dire demographic dilemma Korea would find itself in, in the coming several decades.
2) Prospects for future female nuptiality pattern
Not only the shrinkage in the number of female population in the fertile age category as shown in Table 4 but continuing changes in the female nuptiality pattern are feared to exert a deleterious effect on the nation's demographic profile for the future. For instance, the female mean age at first marriage kept on increasing from 24.8 in 1990 to 26.8 in 2001 (KNSO, 2002: 127, Tables 2-5 and 2-6). For the corresponding period the male mean age at first marriage increased from 27.8 to 29.6 (see Fig. 1 on mean age at marriage, and Appendix 2 on changes in proportion unmarried among female population). Lest one should be misled, the mean age at first marriage is calculated on the basis of the 2001 vital registration data but not on the 2000 census data, since the mean age at first marriage derived from the census data does not coincide with that from the vital registration.
Fig. 1.
Trends in mean age at first marriage for male also increases in tandem with that for female, with the age gap between male and female remaining at three years throughout the 1990's, but starting somewhere in the late 1990's, there are signs that the age gap is getting narrower, perhaps due to the increasing number, however small that may as yet be, of those female population who postpone their marriage as much as possible for one reason or another. The two primary reasons being, increased educational opportunities and the increasing willingness of the female population to participate in labor force.
The delaying of marriage on the part of the female population in their prime fertile age, in particular, for those in the 21-29 age bracket, is certain to work a downward pressure on the nation's fertility as a whole. Moreover, once they cross the 30-year boundary, chances are that a greater number of them will eventually become sub-fecund or infertile and would end up childless, however hard they try to make up for the lost time in their early and mid as well as late twenties.
Another noteworthy feature of female and male nuptiality pattern in the post-1990's is the ever decreasing proportion of the male first marriage-female first marriage pattern as illustrated in Fig. 2. The graph in Fig. 2 is based on the 2001 KNSO vital registration data.
Fig. 2,
In 1990, the male first marriage-female first marriage accounted for 89.3% of the total marriages for that year but that proportion decreased to 79.7% in 2001. In the following Figs. 3(a) and 3(b), though one could easily be misled by graphic illusions due to the greatly enlarged ordinate scalar, one observes that in Fig. 3(a)) the male remarriage-female remarriage pattern more than doubled from 4.7% of the total marriages in 1990 to 10.9% in 2001, and what is more astounding is the rapid increase (Fig. 3(b)) in the male first marriage-female remarriage pattern from 2.3% in 1990 to 5.6% in 2001. The increasing proportion of both the male remarriage-female remarriage pattern and the male first marriage-female remarriage serves a direct indication that the once sacrosanct traditional marriage pattern as observed in Fig. 2 is being unraveled at its very seams. A single man marrying a divorced woman was rarely heard of in the early modern Korean society where arranged marriage prevailed but it does not seem to be so any more.
Fig. 3(a).
Fig. 3(b).
Then, what are the fertility impacts of the recent changes in nuptiality pattern described in Figs. 3(a) and 3(b)? According to the 2001 KNSO vital registration data, mean age at remarriage hovered around 42 years for male and 37.5 years for female for the 1999-2001 period. What this amounts to is that, even though the male remarriage-female remarriage is on the increase of recent years, this emerging remarriage trend would have little or negative effect on the future fertility increase.
That is, if the KNSO vital registration data provide any guide, by the time Korean women get remarried, they would about to have reached their menopause and would not be able to afford anymore child or children, even if they would want to. Needless to say, there are women who do remarry well before they reach menopause, but here again, for most of these women remarrying, childbearing does not seem to warrant the first priority, since not many women seem to get remarried for the sole purpose of childbearing. On the contrary, the remarrying women could have borne additional number of child(ren), provided they did not get divorced and stayed with their erstwhile spouse rather than staying away from childbearing for their expected remarriage. Sure enough, there are a few number of cases where women get remarried after they are widowed far before they reach menopause, but the fertility impact of the widows remarrying appears to be quite negligible.
In Fig. 3(b) the recent increase in proportion of those once-married women marrying single males again seems to bode ill for the nation's future fertility. More often than not, this rather unusual marriage pattern results in young single male marrying a once-married woman, his senior by one or two years, and often times, by three or four years. The 2002 KNSO vital registration on marriage and divorce shows that males marrying females older than themselves accounted for only 8.8% of the total marriages in 1990, but this percentage increased to 11.6% in 2002.
The steady increase in divorce rate is well reflected in the increase in the proportion of the male first marriage-female remarriage in Fig. 3(b), however, here one does not imply that divorced women mostly opt for single males for remarriage. Rather the implication here is the recent rapid increase in divorce rate is likely to make marriage less and less attractive to unmarried female population in the nubile age group and make them seek for means, other than hearth and home through marriage, to provide them with life-long security. This negative attitude toward marriage among unmarried female population is feared to have a "chilling effect" on the future fertility.
3) Women's work and future fertility
Two of the prime causes that contribute to the rising female age at first marriage are the increase in educational opportunities for female and in female labor force participation. Up to the early 1990's, female labor force participation in Korea was low primarily because there was not much room for the female population in the fertile age category to juggle work and menage that includes childbearing and child-rearing as well.
As set out in Fig. 4, female labor force participation rate in 1990 stood at the 28-29% level for those in the most fertile 25-34 age category. The female labor force participation rates for the 1990-2000 period in Fig. 4 invariably maintain the usual bi-modal pattern, with the lowest trough found in the 30-34 age bracket. The pattern clearly shows that most married women drop out of labor force for child-bearing.
Fig. 4. trends in female labor force participation rates (1990-2000)
The bi-modal pattern shows signs of gradually approaching a quasi uni-modality in female labor force participation rate for the year 2000, indicating that, of recent years, most Korean women in the labor force, both married and unmarried, hesitate to drop out of labor force when they get pregnant and even after their childbirths. And some of the women in the labor force postpone childbearing as much as possible, or forgo child-bearing altogether lest they should lose their job.
Economic demographers maintain that the quasi uni-modal female labor force participation pattern for the year 2000 does not result as much from the increase in the number of those female population who do not discontinue their work for child-bearing and child-rearing as from the continuing increase in the female age at first marriage. Furthermore, they point out that the quasi uni-modality pattern succeeds in capturing the inter-cohort female labor force participation rate, but fails to divulge in detail the intra-cohort changes in participation rate (Hahn, 2002: 1-17). Demographers also point out that much of the quasi uni-modality has to do with the diversity and heterogeneity of the occupations that became increasingly available to women; viz. managerial and professional works that remained closed to the distaff up to the recent past (Kim, 2002: 5-40).
Another noteworthy feature in Fig. 4 is the continuing increase in female labor force participation rate for those in the 40-49 age category. These are the women who have finished child-rearing, and thus their labor force participation rate would have little effect on the future fertility level of the country.
The main focus of our concern here is the ever increasing labor force participation rate for both married and unmarried women in the 25-35 age bracket. If past demographic history of West European countries of below replacement-level fertility provides any example, the increase in female labor force participation rate for the 25-35 age category invariably heralds, mutatis mutandis, a continuing fall in fertility. The current situation in Japan provides an exemplary case. In Japan, since 1975 the female labor force participation has increased greatly for women aged 25-29 years, faster than that for women in any other age categories, and to make the matters still "worse," single women in the 25-29 age bracket were much more likely to work than their married counterpart in the same age group: as early as in 1975, the female labor force participation rate at ages 25-29 was 82% for unmarried women as opposed to 32% for married women (Retherford, 2001: 77-78, 99). The rising female labor force participation rate has helped inculcate among Japanese women an entirely new concept toward menage. A study has revealed that between 1982 and 1997 the proportion of Japanese women supporting the statement "The husband should be the breadwinner, and the wife should stay at home" was almost halved from 71% to 46%.
How does it fare in the case of Korea? In the Social Indicators of Korea, 2002 (p. 144, Table 2-21), based on the KNSO's Report on Social Statistics Survey, 1998, 44.3% of the married women answered "Household chores are women's work," 46.5% said "Husbands should render helping hands in household work," while 5.&% were of the opinion that "Husbands and wives should equally share the household chores." Korea does not seem to fare better than Japan.
That is, in Korea the expected future increase in female force participation rate is likely to exacerbate the continuing fall in the fertility level one way or another: for married women, through their virtually resilient hesitance toward childbearing for fear of losing their employment, and for unmarried women, through their ill-conceived efforts to postpone marriage, often times, up to their menopause.
Due to the 1998-99 IMF crunch, male labor force participation rate, as given in Fig. 5, suffered a decline for the 1995-2000 period. In particular, male labor force participation rate for the 45-60 age category, however small the difference may be, is lower for year 2000, compared to that for year 1995, another aftermath of the 1998-1999 financial crisis. All in all, for male in the 30-44 age category, the labor force participation rate averages above 95% for the 1990-2000 period, whereas, that for female for the corresponding period stands at less than 50%. However, female labor force participation rate is continuing to increase, while that for male appears to have reached a plateau, if not heading toward a downward slope.
If the 1991 female labor force participation pattern in Taiwan (Brinton et al, 1995: 1103) provides any guide, the current quasi uni-modal pattern of female labor force participation in Korea is expected to transform into a uni-modality within a decade or so. In Taipei, the female labor force participation pattern took on a uni-modal shape as early as the end of 1980., In Korea, with the number of male population of working-age category expected to dwindle farther down through the middle of this century, the increasing number of female population, both married and unmarried, entering labor market would result in the unprecedented further fall in the nation's fertility level in the mid-2020's. The point here is that, in the case of Korea, further rapid fertility fall did precede the increase in female labor force participation rate as much as the former followed the latter.
III. Root causes of fertility fall
1) Short-term fluctuations vs. a long-term trend
Social demographers often indulge in analyzing three different aspects of demographic phenomena: age, cohort, and period effects. But somehow they in their research customarily focus on the age and the cohort effects, to the neglect of the period effect, since the latter effect cannot be captured so easily as the former two effects. One has to be aware here that the term, period effect, used here does not coincide with the demographic jargon, "period effect" per se. Now, in population studies, most of such long-term phenomenon as demographic transition cannot be explained, if one does not resort to the period effect as such. One dare not to explain such diverse demographic transitions as observed both in Asia, Europe, North America, unless one combines the cohort analysis method with the method of analyzing the pattern or patterns of a particular generation that experienced, if not helped produce, a certain historic event or events (Becker, 1991:25).
To recapitulate, demographic methodology can be perforce classified into three categories: the first one focusing on the cross-sectional age effect, the second one stressing the importance of diachronic cohort effect, and the third one centering on the period effect capturing the influence of historical event(s) on both the age and the cohort effects. Each generation has a distinctive historical consciousness (Pilcher, 1994: 490). The grouping of a cohort or a number of cohorts into a generation, e.g. the Lost Generation, the Protest Generation, thus constitutes what Karl Mannheim (Mannheim, 1923)) once aptly termed "the problem of generation." The generation that experiences a particular path in history easily gets locked in that particular path and thus becomes what demographers call "path dependent."
Here one can find a clue to the expected continuing fall in fertility in Korea for the coming several decades. Beginning in somewhere around 1988, substantially reduced childbearing started among the most fertile 20-29 age group, far in advance of a substantial increase in female labor force participation rate. That is, in Korea, the rapid fertility fall did not follow the increase in female labor market participation, but rather the other way around. But once the rapid fall in fertility regime "locked in," the self-propelling force or trend got reinforced, with little chance of shifting to a different path (of reversing the ultra low fertility trend). Once chosen, a "path dependence can result in changes that proceeds either more quickly or more slowly than would be expected," according to a path dependence theorist (Casterline, 2001: 36). Behavioral mechanism relating to fertility being such that once a below replacement-level fertility is chosen, there is no retracting the path. in the absence of such historic measures as the so-called replacement migration from abroad that the United Nations once cautiously broached for Korea's future population.
Unlike the short-term fluctuations in fertility for particular age categories, the long-lasting trend in the over-all fertility level rarely gets reversed, if "locked into" a path.
2) Social influence and social learning
In the preceding section, mention has been made of the temporal reason that stands in the way of reversing the low fertility trends expected for Korea in the coming several years. Let us now turn our attention to the spatial reason that would further aggravate the still lower fertility level of the country in the future.
Fertility regimes, both high and low, of a society are strongly sustained by cultural norms shaped by powerful social forces. For instance, a juicy piece of passing gossip on the advantages of small family norm through community social network would ultimately dissuade fertile women in the community from having additional number of children, since the diffusion of new information, in particular, on fertility behavior, is channeled through the social interaction among closely-knit (weak ties) as well as loosely-tied (strong ties) networks of community members (Granovetter, 1973: 1360-1380). The social network structure in a community such as membership in village tontines and various women's support networks in Nepal (Madhavan et al, 2003: 59, 65) serves as effective mechanism through which innovative ideas are diffused.
Demographers (Montgomery et al, 1996: 151-175; White et al, 2000: 337-355) usually put forward two distinct hypotheses on social processes that help propagate low fertility norms: (a) social learning, and (b) social influence.
Through social learning, changes in fertility behavior occur when, through repeated discussions and evaluations of information on new ideas, an individual's perception of the risk (including the high cost one has to pay for) attendant upon the new innovative ideas gets reduced to the point where the individual finally decides to adopt the ideas. Whereas, in the case of social influence, individuals adopt new ideas in the process whereby they almost blindly follow the behavior of the select few gatekeepers literally dictating the prevailing social norms of a particular period. They do not want to be in conflict with, or deviate from the prevailing norms, lest they should be stigmatized as societal laggards.
In explaining the rapid fertility fall in Korea in the late-1990's, it does appear that the social influence hypothesis seems to be the more viable one, the reason being that much of the past fertility fall was not so much due to the individual couples' cost-benefit analysis of child-bearing and child-rearing as due to a current of small family norms that swept the Korean peninsula starting in the late-1970's. There is no denying that, even before the late-1970's, there were people who were wary of the economic burdens they would have shoulder if they were to have a large number of children. In fact, there were people who believed in the social learning hypothesis and were thus primed to regard their yet-to-be-born children as consumer durables. But, during this period, the individual couples were not so much concerned with the economic costs and social opportunity costs of child-bearing and child-rearing as with the stigma, "those barbarian tri-parae," tagged on those young couples who failed to read the social current of the period, struggling with more than two children.
No one can be sure whether the social influence hypothesis afore-mentioned would yet prevail over the social learning hypothesis in predicting the future trajectory of the nation's fertility in the coming several decades. But one thing is clear: if the social learning hypothesis exercises stronger influence over the social influence hypothesis in the future, future economic upswing would certainly stop, if not reverse, the continuing down-turn of the current low fertility trend. However, social influence dies hard within a short space of time.
3) “Mentalites collectives" of self-culture
Demographer Bumpass (1990: 483-498) once introduced the term, individuation, in an effort to explain the below replacement-level fertility in part of Western European countries. Under the rubric, individuation, he included the following social phenomenon:
1. weakening of family ties,
2. declining marriage rates,
3. high divorce rates,
4. increasing independence and career orientation of women, and
5. value change towards materialism and consumerism.
Of the five items listed above, the two that deserve a closer attention are the fourth and the fifth: changes in value orientations, in particular, among those women in fertile age category. The last two items were recently re-conceptualized in a neology, individualization or "Individualizierung" (Beck et al, 2002: 104-119). The individualization used here differs from the broader concept, "individuation," used in the neo-liberal sense. The individuation implies the disappearance of any sense of mutual obligation, and is based on the rugged individualism (Abercrombie, 1986: 167) of the market that worships the slogan, "Everyone for his or her own sake, and the devil take the hindmost."
On the other hand, the concept, individualization, differs from individuation in that it is a social process that cannot be created by a set pattern of human mutuality based on established traditions but is moulded by free decisions of interacting individuals, open to a constellation of choices, whether it be in lifestyle or in nuptial and reproductive behavior.
Individualization helps create a consciousness of new freedom, or self-culture, "as the range of options widens and the necessity of deciding between them grows, so too does the need for individually performed actions... (Beck, Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 4)" Hence a new wave of societal movement arguing for women's empowerment: woman is no longer an appendage of the family, and marriage itself does not constitute a prerequisite for a normal family. Therefore, Einzelganger replaces married couple, marriages get delayed, and child-bearing itself procrastinated with willing consents from the spouse (One child is too many).
As a result of individualization, married women in developed countries increasingly develop their life-time expectations for their own persons as much as for their family members as a whole. In a sense, individualization is a form of co-operative individuation. Japanese demographers attribute the "1.3 shock" or the rapid fertility fall in Japan to the emergence of individualization among Japanese women in prime fertile age category. They call it "the revenge of Japanese women." A revenge in the sense that the Japanese fertility fall was due primarily to feminine individualization (Retherford, 1999: 132).
There are yet a few number of demographers who argue it remains to be seen if the current wave of individualization in Korea would continue unabated to constitute a nationwide collective mentality in the coming several decades, but if so, chances are that Korea's fertility would go down even below the 1.3 TFR level, with little possibility of reverting to the replacement level.
A preliminary report from the KNSO released on July 11, 2003, indicates the nation's TFR already plunged down to the 1.17 level in 2002. Every demographer fears the negative momentum of population growth when a population suffers a long-lasting below replacement-level fertility that ultimately would bring about a series of demographic and socio-political turmoils (Demeny, 2003: 1-3). One remembers the post-debacle demographic disaster of Russia.