South Korea Sees First Birth-Rate Rise in Nine Years (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: South Korea is finally having more babies. The country's birth rate has been in steep decline for much of the past decade, until 2024, when it rose for the first time in nine years. And there's a good chance it rose again in 2025. Here's why. For one, couples who delayed their weddings during COVID are getting married and having kids now. It's also partly demographic. There's just a bigger pool of women in their 30s right now. But the government has also spent billions of dollars encouraging couples to have kids, with things like housing subsidies and even cash handouts for new parents. Couples at this baby fair in Seoul told us the measures have helped, somewhat. Experts say it's too soon to tell whether the government's measures can sustain a long-term rise in births. But they warned this could be a temporary bump unless the root causes of the problem are fixed. High costs of living, gender inequality, a grueling work culture, and more.

[00:01:12] Speaker 2: As women, we don't think we are promised to have an equal opportunity as men once we're back from, let's say, maternity leave. We're improving, for sure, but it still has a long way to go, I would say.