A South Korean firm is offering to pay its workers $75,000 each time they have a baby

A South Korean company is ready to pay millions of dollars to help fix the country’s abysmally low birth rate.

Booyoung Group, a construction firm based in Seoul, plans to pay employees 100 million Korean won ($75,000) each time they have a baby, it said in a press release Monday.

It will also pay a total of 7 billion Korean won ($5.25 million) in cash to employees who have had 70 babies since 2021, the company added.

The benefit is available to men and women, a company spokesperson told CNN.

At 0.78 in 2022, South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate — which indicates the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime — and that ratio is expected to drop further to 0.65 in 2025, according to official forecasts from Statistics Korea.

The data underscores the demographic time bomb that South Korea and other East Asian nations are facing as their societies rapidly age just a few decades after their dramatic industrialization.

Many European nations also face aging populations, but the speed and impact of that change is mitigated by immigration. Countries like South Korea, Japan and China, however, have shied away from mass immigration to tackle the decline in their working age populations.

Booyoung Group’s Chairman Lee Joong-keun said the company is offering “direct financial support” to its employees to help ease the monetary burden of raising children.

Employees with three babies will be given an option to choose between receiving 300 million Korean won ($225,000) in cash or rental housing, if the government provides land for construction, he added at a company event on Monday.

Ref: A South Korean firm is offering to pay its workers $75,000 each time they have a baby (cnn)

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