Young people walk on a street in Hongdae, a popular youth district in Seoul, on April 6, 2020. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, May 17 (Korea Bizwire) — With more Koreans postponing marriage and even having a child as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage on, experts are raising the prospects of a ‘population shock’.
A study by professor Choi Seul-ki from the KDI School of Public Policy and Management and professor Kye Bong-oh from Kookmin University argued that the prolonged pandemic has led to a rise in the average marriage age by 0.7 years, while discouraging plans for childbirth by 10 percentage points.
The research team, jointly with local pollster Embrain Public, conducted a survey of 2,000 adult men and women, among which 78.1 percent of those who said they were single without a partner (602 people) hadn’t met with a new potential partner since February of last year when the pandemic broke out.
Asked how more or less frequently they have met with or been introduced to potential partners before and after the pandemic, 46.5 percent of women and 50.4 percent of men said they meet ‘less frequently’ following the coronavirus outbreak.
“While engaging in fewer personal meetings over the last 12 months may have helped in terms of quarantine, it might also have undermined the efforts of many individuals in their life stages of marriage and childbirth,” Choi said.
In fact, 20.7 percent of single women became ‘less interested in marriage’ following the onset of the pandemic, which was four times more than those who became ‘more interested in marriage’ (5.9 percent).
For men, the rate of response was similar in both groups (10.9 percent and 10.3 percent, respectively).
The research team argued that spending longer hours at home with family following the onset of the pandemic gradually led to more pressure on women in terms of homemaking and child rearing, disillusioning many young women on the idea of marriage.
When married couples without children were asked if they planned to have kids within the next two years, 42 percent of women and 34.7 percent of men said they did not.
H. M. Kang (hmkang@koreabizwire.com)
