At a postpartum care center in Seoul, nurses and other staff members are tending to newborns in the nursery. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
SEOUL, July 3 (Korea Bizwire) — If current demographic trends continue, South Korea’s population could plunge to just 15% of its current level within a century, according to a new report by the Korean Peninsula Population Institute for Future, a private think tank specializing in demographic research.
The institute’s 2025 Population Report: The Great Demographic Transformation of Korea, released on Tuesday, projects that by 2125, South Korea’s population could drop to as low as 7.53 million people under its most pessimistic scenario — a dramatic decline from the current 51.7 million.
Even under the most optimistic projection, the population would still fall below 16 million, or less than one-third of today’s total.
The long-term forecast is based on cohort-component methodology, a globally recognized approach that calculates future population by factoring in fertility, mortality, and migration trends. The findings indicate an accelerating decline, with population numbers expected to shrink by 30% by 2075 and more than halve again by 2125 under the median scenario.
The aging population compounds the problem. By 2100, there could be 140 elderly people for every 100 working-age individuals — more than four times the current old-age dependency ratio. That would mark a drastic shift toward an “inverted pyramid” society, where the number of dependents outweighs the economically active population.
The report also analyzed nearly 60,000 posts from the online professional community Blind to better understand attitudes toward marriage and childbirth among people in their 20s to 40s.
It found that concerns over finances and housing outweigh emotional factors like love in discussions about marriage, while economic burdens dominate conversations about childbearing.
To reverse the demographic tide, the institute recommends an ambitious suite of policy reforms: increased financial support for childbirth and parenting, the normalization of work-life balance, extended retirement age and continued employment, and a restructured immigration policy.
Most critically, the report calls for a pivot to a productivity-centered economic model to sustain national resilience in the face of an inevitable population decline.
M. H. Lee (mhlee@koreabizwire.com)
