That is what this Bloomberg article is calling for:
Back in Seoul, officials appear more focused on addressing a cyclical slowdown than the broader shift in economic and social life. The Bank of Korea is on its way to zero interest rates and fiscal taps are being opened to buttress slowing activity. Yet only policies that create more people have a prayer.
That’s why immigration has to be part of the solution. Foreigners make up about 3.7% of South Korea’s population, according to an OECD report in January. While that’s low by global standards, the good news is that this proportion is growing fast. During a recent cross-country trip, I noticed that few of the servers at restaurants were local. Vietnamese, Chinese and South Asians took orders and whisked food to tables. “Without foreigners, work won’t get done,” Lee, the shop owner, explained. “Korean young people won’t do it; the few that are left here don’t want to do physical work.”
Many immigrants work in manufacturing, construction and retail, filling gaps left by aging locals. The risk is that foreigners get hemmed into low-paying jobs. Korea has attracted a lot of students from abroad in the past decade, but only 15% of graduates remain. More needs to be done to retain this talent.
Bloomberg
You can read more at the link.
So if South Korea does increase their birthrate then where are all these people going to go in such a small country?
President Park Geun-hye called Friday for measures to address South Korea’s low birthrate and aging population, which experts say could undermine the vitality of Asia’s fourth-largest economy.
South Korea’s birthrate stood at 1.19 in 2013, the lowest among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 34 mostly rich nations.
South Korea has tried in vain to boost a falling birthrate as the rising cost of raising a child and job shortages have discouraged women from having more children.
Park said the next five year is the golden time in handling the country’s population crisis marked by the low birthrate and rapidly aging population.
“We can transform a crisis into an opportunity and create a sustainable growth engine only when we properly cope with” the population crisis, Park said in a meeting meant to address both issues at the presidential office.
By 2018, South Korea is expected to become an “aged society,” in which 14 percent of the population is 65 or older. [Yonhap]
You can read the rest at the link, but basically the problem becomes that there are less workers supporting a large number of aged people. So it sounds like the government is admitting to a ponzi scheme that is unsupportable without more people signing up for it.
