As per reports, in a bid to tackle the country’s poor birth rate, a South Korean construction company is offering to pay a hefty sum of $75,000 (approximately 62.28 lakh in Indian rupees) to its employees each time they have a baby.
Company Incentivizing Parenthood by Cash Payments
The company also said that it shall be giving cash payments of $5.25 million or ₹ 43,58,27,437 to employees who have given birth to 70 children since 2021. The offer is extended to both male as well as female employees.
Lee Joong-keun, Chairman of Booyoung Group, said that “I hope we would get recognized as a company that contributes to encouraging births and worries about the country’s future”. He also said that the grant from the company would directly help its employees to help ease the financial burden of raising children.
Joong-keun said that the option of getting $225,000 ( ₹ 1,86,78,318) in cash or rental housing if the government supplies land for the building shall be given to those employees who will have 3 newborns.
South Korea’s Fertility Crisis
This initiative by the company comes at a time especially when the country’s fertility rates are precarious. As per the stats, South Korea has the world’s lowest average fertility rate of 0.78 in 2022.
As compared to last year, this year saw the number of newborns down from 260,600 to 249,000.
Ever since 2015, the nation is witnessing the decline in the birth rates. Also, it has been estimated the same would drop to 0.65 in 2025 and 0.59 by 2026. By 2072, it is expected that the birth rate would gradually recover to 1.08. However, this figure is still below 2.1 births per woman threshold which is statistically the correct number necessary to sustain population stability in case of no immigration.
South Korea’s total population is expected to fall from 51.75 million in 2024 to 36.22 million, which particularly perilous since this is a level which the nation has not seen since 1977.
