Bloomberg: South Korean company pays $72,000 to employees for having a baby
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In South Korea, the construction company Booyoung has launched a birthrate support program under which each employee will receive 100 million won (about $72,000) for the birth of a child. About writes Bloomberg.

The company introduced these payments retroactively, meaning that employees will receive them for children born in the last three years.

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Thanks to this program, the number of newborns among the company's employees has already increased. In 2024, employees gave birth to five more children than usual. In total, about 100 employees received payments, and none of them left the company.

Booyoung took this step against the backdrop of South Korea's lowest birth rate among all countries in the world – only 0.75 children per woman. If the trend continues, Korea's population will decline by almost a third by 2072.

Other large businesses have taken up the initiative. Game developer Krafton has started paying $43,000 for birth and another $29,000 for the first eight years of a child's life, while aircraft manufacturer Korea Aerospace Industries offers $7,000 for the first and second child and $22,000 for the third.

In addition, the Hanwha Group has already spent more than $820,000 to support employees who are parents.

The South Korean government is also actively encouraging the birth rate by offering parents subsidized housing, cash payments, and tax breaks. In Seoul, for example, families without their own housing receive more than $5,000 in assistance for each child.

As a result of these measures, in 2024, for the first time in almost a decade, the country's birth rate rose and the number of marriages increased.

For comparison, in Ukraine, the proportion of people aged 65 and older increased from 12% in 1991 to 22% in 2024.

The birth rate, which is lower than that required for simple population replacement, has been observed in Ukraine since the mid-1960s.

Since the beginning of Russia's armed aggression, according to estimates by the Institute of Demography and Quality of Life Problems of the National Academy of Sciences, the total fertility rate has fallen to 0.9.