Four out of 10 South Korean newlywed couples had no child as of last year, indicating a rising trend among the younger generation of distancing themselves from dating, marriage and having babies, data from statistical office showed Thursday.
The number of newlyweds, who had been married for five years, totaled 1,322,000 as of November 2018, according to Statistics Korea.
The number of couples consisting of first-time brides and grooms was 1,052,000, or 79.6 percent of the total.
Out of the first-time newlyweds, the number of couples with no kid was 423,000, or 40.2 percent of the total, as of last November. It was up 2.6 percentage points from a year earlier.
An average number of babies, who the newlyweds had, was 0.74 as of last November, down from 0.78 a year earlier.
The country's total fertility rate, which measures an average number of children a woman bears during lifetime, was 0.98 in 2018, far lower than the replacement level of 2.1 that is required to keep the country's population stable at 51 million.
The younger generation was increasingly distancing themselves from dating, marriage and having babies due mainly to soaring real estate prices, difficulties in finding decent jobs, and higher costs of private education for children.
The newlyweds with a longer marriage and their own home, of whom the brides did not work, tended to have kids.
An average number of babies, who the second-year newlyweds had, was 0.5, with the figure surging to 1.19 for the fifth-year couples.
Newlyweds, of whom both spouses work, had 0.66 babies on average, with the reading climbing to 0.84 for couples with bribes having no job.
Newlyweds without their own home had 0.69 babies on average, with the figure rising to 0.81 for couples having their own home.
