ĭespite the relative youth of North Korea’s population, however, unification would not necessarily lead to population growth. In North Korea, the average life expectancy (as of 2019) is estimated to be 68.6 years for men and 75 years for women, compared to 80.3 years for South Korean men and 86.3 years for. Though North Korea’s birth rate is higher, these differences in population structure are also due to life expectancy. By that time, nearly 30 percent of South Koreans will be over sixty-five, while North Korea’s elderly population is not projected to approach 30 percent until 2100. By comparison, around 16 percent of South Koreas are over sixty-five-a level that North Korea is not projected to reach until about 2035. (South Korea’s birth rate plummeted to 0.84 in 2020.) While both countries’ figures are below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman, only about 9 percent of North Korea’s population is over the age of sixty-five. North Korea and South Korea are projected to average 1.86 and 1.08 births per woman, respectively, between 20, though the UN’s population projections have not yet accounted for significant drops in South Korea’s birth rate since 2019. Yet North Korea’s population is also aging, albeit more slowly. Projections from the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, modeled in figure 1, show that North Korea’s age structure skews younger than South Korea’s, with roughly 91 percent of the North’s population under the age of sixty-five compared to about 84 percent of South Korea’s citizenry. The Demographic Profile of a Unified Korea Though unification would add millions to a united Korea’s population, the unpredictable social and economic consequences of unification and their potential impact on North Korea’s fertility rate and life expectancies could limit how readily such a population influx would help ameliorate the impact of population aging in a unified Korea. More >īut the reality is more complicated. Her research focuses on Asian security issues, with particular emphasis on the Korean Peninsula and U.S. Kathryn Botto was a senior research analyst in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 1 A redistribution of the peninsula’s age pyramid through unification, then, would at first glance seem to present a fix to the impending crises posed by South Korea’s demographic problem. Estimates indicate that South Korea will need about 15.3 million more working-age immigrants by 2060 to keep the labor force from contracting, and North Korea’s working age population is estimated at around 18 million. This demographic shift is an increasingly essential item on the balance sheet of unification’s benefits and challenges.Īs others in this compendium have pointed out, South Korea’s rapidly aging population will bring on economic, social, and security challenges that an influx of young people to the country could mitigate.
South Korea’s birth rate is now the lowest in the world, and the country’s population will continue to age, even if unification were to someday infuse some 25 million North Koreans into the equation. However, Park’s pronouncement stemmed from the assumption that South Korea’s technological prowess and capital coupled with North Korea’s natural resources and labor pool would be a winning combination.īut if unification were to happen, the positive economic effects Park described would have to contend with the negative economic and social consequences of South Korea’s most transformational demographic trend-population aging. In 2014, former South Korean president Park Geun-hye surprised many observers when she referred to Korean unification as a “jackpot.” Unification of North and South Korea is usually discussed in terms of its exorbitant costs-estimates range from 7 percent of South Korea’s gross domestic product for ten years to $3 trillion or more.
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