Can We Avoid the Demographic Collapse Crisis?

Concerns about the crisis of population extinction are being heard everywhere. In some regions, people worry that the population will keep shrinking until the city itself disappears. More and more businesspeople are rushing to automate in preparation for an era in which it is hard to find workers. Which regions, if any, can truly avoid the crisis of population extinction?

The seriousness of the population problem is fully predictable. Even so, the reason responses to the population crisis keep failing is that policy capacity is focused solely on preventing the decline in the birthrate. This problem cannot be solved through superficial and normative approaches. No matter how much public money is poured in, the population crisis cannot be avoided.

As advanced countries went through periods of economic growth, they saw birthrates decline and population growth slow. People moved away from a way of life dependent solely on agriculture, became more prosperous, and came to enjoy the abundance of city life. Developing countries with large populations also continued to benefit from economic growth through industrialization, but they too began to show the same population problems as advanced countries. China in particular is likely to suffer serious aftereffects from the failure of its population policy.

Regions that attract people and capital create a boom. Such regions grow rapidly, and their average age is lower. By contrast, regions that people leave behind enter a period of stagnation caused by population decline and aging. That said, it would be foolish to try to stop people from leaving by mobilizing administrative power. People have the freedom to move to where they want to live.

In Korea as well, many cities are gradually losing their vitality. More and more cities are facing a crisis in which declining populations lead to weakened functions. A common trait of stagnating regions is that they are not attractive places to live. There is always a reason people do not move in and instead leave. If a place is closed to the inflow and outflow of people and does not protect property rights, people will leave in search of freer places.

Cities and countries that have remained vibrant even after industrialization share one characteristic: openness. The greater a city’s social inclusiveness and openness, the more people and capital flow into it. Because people have the freedom to leave easily, the incentive to move there also grows. The most representative country in the world where the population continued to grow and the average age remained low was the United States. The United States was a nation of immigrants, and always a country that attracted young people.

To overcome the population problem, we must work to make our cities attractive places where people want to live and invest. Institutional support is needed to make them free cities—open cities where people can believe that they and their descendants will still find them good places to live in the future, better than any other city in the world.

Sung-no Choi, President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: 인구소멸 위기를 피할 수 있을까

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2024-02-02

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=press&idx=26439