Recently, low fertility has emerged as a serious social problem in Korea. Low fertility leads to decline in the population of working ages of 15-64 and increasing share of the elderly population. Many older people are the direct cause of looming soci...
Recently, low fertility has emerged as a serious social problem in Korea. Low fertility leads to decline in the population of working ages of 15-64 and increasing share of the elderly population. Many older people are the direct cause of looming social burden.
Total fertility rate (TFR) is used as the most important statistical index in the domain of pronatalist population policy. This conventional measure refers the total number of children a women would have during her entire reproductive life. However, it often does not accurately measure a drop in fertility due to the tempo effect, resulting in the quantity smaller or larger than actually realized fertility. In this regard, an alternative measure has been developed by removing the tempo effect from the conventional TFR.
In this dissertation, the study begins with a review of actual change in TFR in order to grasp how accurately it reflects the low fertility situation prevailing in South Korea. Then, it moves to discuss two components of marital fertility and unmarried population the conventional TFR can be decomposed into.
Often, the tempo-adjusted TFR is calculated using the mean age at childbearing derived from vital statistics alone. However, this vital statistics-based mean age at childbearing is very sensitive to change in age structure of a population, relative to the period mean age at childbearing; and due to the larger fluctuation of vital statistics-based mean ages at childbearing, the conventional TFR tends to be adjusted inappropriately. Because of this, we introduce the concept of the period mean age at childbearing, which is different from vital statistics-based mean age at childbearing.
In addition, we define the adjusted total marital fertility rate, which means ‘total number of children a woman who would marry eventually would have during her reproductive life. This measure is different from the conventional total marital fertility, which means total number of children a married woman would have during the entire reproductive life. In 2009, the adjusted total marital fertility rate is estimated at 1.72 births. Even though this adjusted total marital fertility rate is higher than the conventional TFR or the tempo-adjusted TFR, it may be difficult for government administrators to help increase the total fertility rate mainly because of an increasing share of unmarried population in Korea.