₹60,000 a month: Why this Asian country will pay to parents of new born child?
According to a budget proposal unveiled this week, the handout will begin next year at a level of 700,000 won a month and then rise to the full amount in 2024.
In its latest move to encourage more births and address the low fertility rate issue, the government of South Korea is planning to provide every family with a newborn child with a monthly allowance of 1 million won ($740), according to the news agency Bloomberg.
According to a budget proposal unveiled this week, the handout will begin next year at a level of 700,000 won a month and then rise to the full amount in 2024. Once the child turns one year old, the allowance will be reduced by half and run for a further year.
This allowance is locally called "parent pay". The one-million-won allowance was among a series of pledges by President Yoon Suk Yeol during his election campaign and an address to Korea’s low birth rate. He had described the demographic outlook as a national "calamity".
The spending initiative on newborn babies underscores the urgency of tackling one of the nation's greatest long-term risks, as per Bloomberg reports.
However, under the previous administration of Moon Jae-in, each newborn child was provided with 300,000 won a month over their first year. That program will now be subsumed by Yoon’s.
South Korea hit record low fertility rate in 2021
In 2021, South Korea has recorded an all-time low fertility rate. According to 2021 birth statistics released by Statistics Korea, the number of newborn babies last year was 266,600, down 11,800 (-4.3%) from a year ago.
However, the fertility rate of women over 35 years of age has increased in 2021 as compared to the previous one. The statistics show that the fertility rate in the early 40s was the highest.
The number of newborn babies annually was around one million until 1970, when statistics began to be compiled, but continued to decrease to 500,000 in 2001 and 400,000 in 2002, according to the data as quoted by news agency ANI.
In 2017, it fell to 300,000 and further decreased to 200,000 in 2020.
Meanwhile, the crude birth rate, which indicates the number of births per 1,000 populations, also hit a record low of 5.1. The total fertility rate was 0.81, down 0.03 (-3.4%) from the previous year.
It is also the lowest ever, and Korea was the only country that had a total fertility rate of less than one among the 38 OECD member countries.
At the same time, the agency reported that the number of multi-child families is also falling. In 2021, the number of children born in families with two or more children was 21,000, down 5.9% year-on-year.
(With inputs from agencies)
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First Published:31 Aug 2022, 09:50 AM IST
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