From Developmental to Post-Developmental Demographic Changes : A Perspectival Recount on South Korea :A Perspectival Recount on South Korea

Chang Kyung-Sup

doi:10.21562/kjs.2015.12.49.6.21

주제분류

A Perspectival Recount on South Korea

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저널정보

한국사회학회
한국사회학 학술저널
한국사회학 제49집 6호
2015.12 21 - 45 (25page)
DOI : 10.21562/kjs.2015.12.49.6.21

저자정보

Chang Kyung-Sup (Seoul National University)

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Since the early 1960s, South Korea has undergone extremely rapid and fundamental transformation in both demographic and developmental dimensions. The rates of migration/urbanization, fertility, and mortality changed at an unprecedented and incomparable pace in parallel with similarly swift changes in economic growth, industrialization, proletarianization, etc. This dual transformation was no coincidence as the country’s developmental path directly involved critical changes in demographic conditions, processes, and consequences. Conversely, South Korea’s economic crisis and restructuring since the late 1990s have both required and caused drastic reformulation of human resources, family relations, and reproductive behaviors, so that earlier demographic trends were further accelerated in some aspects and suddenly slowed down or reversed in others. South Korea’s literally compressed sociodemographic changes in a socially complex developmental context offer several significant historical and/or theoretical implications, including (1) spatial demographic imbalances due to intergenerationally divided urban migration, (2) fertility decline with alternating gender asymmetry, (3) demographic individualization under sustained familialism, (4) constant realignment between individual life course and family life cycle, and (5) socioeconomically discrete two-stage population aging. As these demographic transformations tend to fundamentally undermine the hitherto taken-for-granted social conditions for national economic management and state governance, the country has been aggressively exploring strategic measures for reversing or relieving demographic deficits and imbalances – largely in terms of bolstering reproductive citizenship for women, both locally (i.e., offering fertility benefits and reducing childcare burdens for native women) and globally (i.e., inviting foreign brides for reproductive labor in urban peripheries and villages).

#South Korea #development #population #reproduction #gender #generation