Fertility, Mortality, and Life Expectancy

South Korea posted a total fertility rate of 0.72 births per woman in 2023, the lowest ever recorded for a country of its size and a figure demographers describe as without historical precedent outside wartime or famine conditions. Taiwan and Hong Kong have registered comparably extreme lows, near 0.87 and 0.75 respectively in recent years, while Japan's TFR has hovered around 1.2 to 1.3 for over a decade despite sustained government efforts to reverse it. Analysts point to a common cluster of causes across these societies: the extraordinarily high cost and competitiveness of raising children, especially private tutoring (hagwon in Korea, juku in Japan); long working hours and rigid corporate cultures that penalize parental leave, particularly for women; expensive urban housing concentrated around a handful of megacities such as Seoul and Tokyo; and a falling marriage rate, since childbearing outside marriage remains rare and heavily stigmatized in all three societies, unlike in much of Europe. South Korea's government has spent over 300 trillion won (roughly $225 billion) on pro-natal programs since 2006 with no reversal of the trend, a result frequently cited as evidence that cash incentives alone cannot offset deeper structural and cultural pressures on young couples.