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Korea's population is decreasing due to the low birth rate and aging population.
In particular, the average number of births, the'total fertility rate', which is expected to give birth to a woman in a lifetime, continued to decrease, reaching a record low of 0.84 last year.
It is the lowest among 37 OECD member countries, and there is even a forecast that it will be lower this year.
This is Hwa Kang-yoon reporter.
<Reporter>
Last year, the number of Koreans died for the first time in history, surpassing the number of births by 33,000.
The number of deaths was rather low, and the number of births fell so quickly that the population began to retreat.
The number of births was 272,400, and the 300,000 line was first broken.
It took 15 years to descend below the 400,000 line, but it took only 3 years for the 300,000 line to collapse.
The total fertility rate, the average number of births a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, was 0.84, the lowest in the world.
Korea was the first to record a total fertility rate of less than 1 except for cities like Macau in the early 2000s.
It is half of the average of OECD member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but it is far less than Japan, which entered an ultra-aged society before Korea.
As a result of being overwhelmed, marriages decreased by more than 10% due to Corona 19 last year.
[Kim Soo-young / Director of Population Trends, Statistics Korea: In particular, in the case of the previous year, there is room for a little further reduction in the number of births in the state that marriages have decreased significantly due to corona...
.] As
the number of deaths increases due to aging and the number of births continues with the decline in marriages, the National Statistical Office predicts that the population cliff will become steeper.
(Video coverage: Kim Min-cheol, Video editing: So Ji-hye)