October 14, 2025 • 15 mins
South Korean companies are offering workers tens of thousands of dollars (tax free) to have babies. But are cash incentives enough to address the country’s record-low fertility rates? K. Oanh Ha and Bloomberg’s Hyonhee Shin explore on today’s Big Take Asia podcast.
Read more: Korean Companies Pay Employees Huge Sums to Have More Kids
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Honky is a thirty seven year old father of to
living in South Korea. After his second child was born
last year, he took six months paid paternity leave to
take care of the kids, money, and to welcome his
new baby. The company also gave him seventy two thousand
(00:31):
dollars no strings attached. Honky says when he got the news,
he was so excited he couldn't mat and the good
news didn't stop there. Honki and his wife learned his
company would give him another seventy two thousand retroactively applied
for their first child, who was born in twenty twenty one.
(00:55):
Honky says thanks to that gift, he and his wife
have been able to move to a bigger house. They're
also thinking about having a third child.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
You think.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Hongi's company, a construction firm called Wu Yong, is one
of dozens of firms in Korea offering financial incentives to
employees if they have babies. Bloomberg's Yung Hi Shin says
these companies are hoping the baby bonuses, together with a
host of other family friendly policies, will help boost South
Korea's fertility rate that's now at just zero point seventy
(01:33):
five births per woman, the lowest on the planet.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Korea is indeed facing a population crisis. The population is
projected to a shrink by almost a third by twenty
seventy two. If we don't do something, and it has
massive implications. There will be a shrinking workforce, tax revenue falling,
and Korea is technically at war against North Korea and
(01:58):
there will be no pie all joining the military to
protect the country.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloueberg News. I'm Wanha.
Every week we take you inside some of the world's
biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and
businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today on the show,
why are Korean companies paying their employees big bucks to
have babies? And our baby bonuses a long term solution.
(02:41):
Global birth rates have been declining for decades, falling from
five births per woman in nineteen sixty to just above
two last year. The phenomenon is especially pronounced in South Korea,
which has had the lowest birth rate in the world
for most of the past two decades.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
That's a top priority for the government for many years
and last year as the former president, he declared a
national demographic emergency.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Kyung Hi Shin is a Bloomberg reporter based in Seoul.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
So the government has been spending hundreds of billions of
dollars to fix the problem.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Developed countries with low birth rates like South Korea, worry
that unless they have more babies, they won't have enough
workers to support their economies and enough taxpayers to support
their aging populations. In South Korea, the government's tried expanding
childcare subsidies, extending parental leave, offering mortgages at lower rates,
(03:38):
even offering financial support for Soul residents looking to reverse vasectomies.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
By law, a couple can have combined three years of
shared parental leaf you can use through three years at
any time and up until your child becomes eight years old.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Korea is not the only Asian nation offering incentives to
would be parents. In Hong Kong, residents are entitled to
fourteen weeks of paid maternity leave and a one time
baby bonus of twenty six hundred US dollars. In Japan,
families with three or more kids are eligible to get
most of the university tuition fees covered by the government,
(04:16):
but Korea's efforts to tackle its declining birth rate go
above and beyond what many other countries are willing to do.
And now Korean corporations like Buyong are jumping in with
initiatives of their own.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
They were the first one to go very b and
the founder he's pretty old, he's eighty four, but he's
been doing lots of the lanthropy work over the past
several years. And February last year, the company usually holds
New Year's ceremony, so where the founder comes up and
then he gives a speech. It was supposed to be
just a regular ceremony, but he made as a price announcement.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
The founder announced the company would give one hundred million
Korean one about seventy two thousand dollars to every employee
who welcomes a baby, and the new policy applied to
all babies born within the past three years.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
There was a literal silence, and then some people were shouting,
and then some people were almost breaking up in tears.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
For some couples, it was like winning the lottery. Seventy
two thousand dollars is about double the annual per capita
income in Korea, and the money goes directly into the
employee's bank account and isn't taxed by the government.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
You can't really buy your house the fact, but you
can get a new car and then you can hire,
you know, some people who can help take care of
your baby or are you.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
A house At Boujong, the bonus doesn't have any conditions attached.
Employees can even get their baby pay out and quit
the next day, but no one has. Out of the
one hundred or so employees that have gotten the bonuses,
Boujong said all are still with the company, and since
introducing the baby bonus more than a year ago, the
company believes it's see an impact.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Buyong has given out the bonus to about one hundred
employees so far, and they had twenty eight employees last year.
That's about the five people more than the previous three
years on average, and the company thinks the policy did
encourage some people to have babies and Korea, the corporate
(06:23):
culture has been pretty rigid, and it's also construction company
where it's dominated by male employees, mostly so it has
the low and work hours and very paternal estate office culture.
Because they introduced the policy, employees are encouraging each other
to have babies and then get married and beyond a
(06:43):
parent belief, so there is some change in the making.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Jung Ki says Buyong's parents' success has inspired other big companies.
In crea the follow suit, she found dozens of public
and private companies are offering payouts to employees who have babies,
and handouts like these are costing cream companies millions of
dollars a year.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
We put young. It has more to do with the
founders philosophy. He's a patriotic man and he's been saying
he wanted to give back to the society. For other companies,
they see it as part of their corporate social responsibility progress,
and it also helps them bring talent. In the end,
these companies think paying workers right now to have babies
(07:28):
coupe cheaper in the very long term than warning a
business in a country where you have no babies and
no workers to hire.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
But it's unclear if these incentive programs will do that
much to boost Korea's birth rate. That's because baby bonuses
only address one part of the problem expensive childcare and
developed countries, the.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Decision making about whether and when to have children is
very complex.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Kathleen mogil Guard is the president and CEO of the
Population Institute, nonprofit in Washington, DC that researches population trends.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Often it is about the costs of raising a child,
but there are also a number of personal decisions about timing,
about spacing, about the kinds of relationships we have in
our life, around whether or not we feel like that
is the kind of future that we see for ourselves
and for our families.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Other countries that have introduced baby bonuses have seen only
short lived success in boosting birth rates. Australia and Hungary
provided cash handouts to new parents at various times in
the past two decades, and while they saw an initial
bump in births, their birth rates eventually declined again.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
What we have seen so far is that governments sometimes
invest a lot of resources in these kinds of incentives
and it doesn't move the needle in any significant way
that we have seen so far.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
In Korea, though there are glimmers of hope, the country's
birth rate went up last year for the first time
I'm in a decade, and while it's not clear what
the exact reason was for the uptick or if the
trend will continue, almost all experts agree that handouts aren't
a permanent solution. Structural changes are.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
In places where fertility is dropping very low. That can
serve as a signal to governments to take a look
at what is happening in society that is resulting in
these kinds of extremes in fertility patterns, and that could
invite us to better understand the barriers that they may
(09:35):
be experiencing to achieving their child bearing desires. There may
be things that are playing out in terms of gender equity,
inflexible work policies, or dynamics culturally within the household that
might serve as disincentives for women to have a child
or have another.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Child after the break the economics of declining birth rates
and what could work to persuade people to have more babies.
(10:16):
Although women have been having far fewer babies on average
compared to previous generations, the world's population is still growing overall.
The United Nations says only around sixty countries are seeing
their populations decline, but the population in more than one
hundred and twenty other countries, including the United States, is
still growing and appears on track to keep growing for
(10:40):
the next thirty years.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Even though there is kind of this panic right now
about population decline. We are actually in a period of
continuing population growth for decades to come.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Kathleen Mogilgard from the Population Institute sees it this way.
We're not living in a period of demographic decline, but
demographic diversity.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
The world's population is likely to add another two billion
people through this century. We're currently at about eight point
two billion people globally. Projections from the United Nations indicate
that we are likely to continue to grow through this
century globally to about ten or more billion by the
(11:22):
mid twenty eighties.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
She says, in some ways, the story of the birth
rate decline is actually one of progress.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
There have been more opportunities for women and girls around
the world, an expansion of rights for women and girls
when it comes to education, when it comes to entering
the workforce, and when it comes to accessing the services
and the information that enable women to have agency over
their reproductive lives.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
And new research shows that in places with ultra low
fertility rates like South Korea, gender dynamics have a lot
to do with why women are having fewer kids.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Emerging recent search indicates cultural changes around gender roles and
the greater sharing of household responsibilities and duties between men
and women is something that can be really supportive of
women's decision making about whether to have a child or
to have another child when she can have that assurance
(12:19):
that those responsibilities will be shared equally.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
And while South Korea's fertility incentives and baby bonuses are
aimed at supporting its economy, Kathleen argues countries don't necessarily
need more babies to sustain their economic growth.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
So, for example, in Japan, which has been in population
decline for quite some time, the per capita GDP in
Japan continues on an upward trajectory. So if we're thinking
about what it means to have a healthy economic life
for the individual, there has been continued economic growth on
an individual level even as that country is experiencing population decline.
(13:00):
So the overall economic picture for countries is less about
the number of people but more about kind of economic
productivity within a country, and there are lots of different
ways to stimulate economic productivity. We can invest more in
training and in education for people. We can think about
ways to shift economic systems so that we get greater
(13:23):
output from the same number of people, or fewer numbers
of people.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
To maintain a stable population where there's no growth or decline,
the average woman needs to have roughly two children. Bloomberg's
Jonghi Shin says South Korea is still a long way
short of that number, and even the South Korean government
acknowledges that to close that gap, it'll need more than
a few companies offering baby bonuses.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Their goal is to raise the fertility rate to one
twenty thirty. Right now it's at zero point them stepifive.
The government panel that I interview said you have to
be working five times harder to reach that goal. Experts
say money is a good way to encourage people to
(14:13):
have babies, but you know there has to be more
other issues being resolved. So at smare companies, you might
not get a bonus, but they can be more flexible.
It has to come all together to move them little
and bring about real change.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm
oneh to get more from The Big Take and unlimited
access to all of Bloomberg dot Com, subscribe today at
Bloomberg dot com slash podcast offer. If you liked the episode,
make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take Asia.
Wherever you listen to podcasts, it really helps people find
the show. Thanks for listening, See you next time. A D.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Honky is a thirty seven year old father of to
living in South Korea. After his second child was born
last year, he took six months paid paternity leave to
take care of the kids, money, and to welcome his
new baby. The company also gave him seventy two thousand
(00:31):
dollars no strings attached. Honky says when he got the news,
he was so excited he couldn't mat and the good
news didn't stop there. Honki and his wife learned his
company would give him another seventy two thousand retroactively applied
for their first child, who was born in twenty twenty one.
(00:55):
Honky says thanks to that gift, he and his wife
have been able to move to a bigger house. They're
also thinking about having a third child.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
You think.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Hongi's company, a construction firm called Wu Yong, is one
of dozens of firms in Korea offering financial incentives to
employees if they have babies. Bloomberg's Yung Hi Shin says
these companies are hoping the baby bonuses, together with a
host of other family friendly policies, will help boost South
Korea's fertility rate that's now at just zero point seventy
(01:33):
five births per woman, the lowest on the planet.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Korea is indeed facing a population crisis. The population is
projected to a shrink by almost a third by twenty
seventy two. If we don't do something, and it has
massive implications. There will be a shrinking workforce, tax revenue falling,
and Korea is technically at war against North Korea and
(01:58):
there will be no pie all joining the military to
protect the country.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloueberg News. I'm Wanha.
Every week we take you inside some of the world's
biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and
businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today on the show,
why are Korean companies paying their employees big bucks to
have babies? And our baby bonuses a long term solution.
(02:41):
Global birth rates have been declining for decades, falling from
five births per woman in nineteen sixty to just above
two last year. The phenomenon is especially pronounced in South Korea,
which has had the lowest birth rate in the world
for most of the past two decades.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
That's a top priority for the government for many years
and last year as the former president, he declared a
national demographic emergency.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Kyung Hi Shin is a Bloomberg reporter based in Seoul.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
So the government has been spending hundreds of billions of
dollars to fix the problem.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Developed countries with low birth rates like South Korea, worry
that unless they have more babies, they won't have enough
workers to support their economies and enough taxpayers to support
their aging populations. In South Korea, the government's tried expanding
childcare subsidies, extending parental leave, offering mortgages at lower rates,
(03:38):
even offering financial support for Soul residents looking to reverse vasectomies.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
By law, a couple can have combined three years of
shared parental leaf you can use through three years at
any time and up until your child becomes eight years old.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Korea is not the only Asian nation offering incentives to
would be parents. In Hong Kong, residents are entitled to
fourteen weeks of paid maternity leave and a one time
baby bonus of twenty six hundred US dollars. In Japan,
families with three or more kids are eligible to get
most of the university tuition fees covered by the government,
(04:16):
but Korea's efforts to tackle its declining birth rate go
above and beyond what many other countries are willing to do.
And now Korean corporations like Buyong are jumping in with
initiatives of their own.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
They were the first one to go very b and
the founder he's pretty old, he's eighty four, but he's
been doing lots of the lanthropy work over the past
several years. And February last year, the company usually holds
New Year's ceremony, so where the founder comes up and
then he gives a speech. It was supposed to be
just a regular ceremony, but he made as a price announcement.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
The founder announced the company would give one hundred million
Korean one about seventy two thousand dollars to every employee
who welcomes a baby, and the new policy applied to
all babies born within the past three years.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
There was a literal silence, and then some people were shouting,
and then some people were almost breaking up in tears.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
For some couples, it was like winning the lottery. Seventy
two thousand dollars is about double the annual per capita
income in Korea, and the money goes directly into the
employee's bank account and isn't taxed by the government.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
You can't really buy your house the fact, but you
can get a new car and then you can hire,
you know, some people who can help take care of
your baby or are you.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
A house At Boujong, the bonus doesn't have any conditions attached.
Employees can even get their baby pay out and quit
the next day, but no one has. Out of the
one hundred or so employees that have gotten the bonuses,
Boujong said all are still with the company, and since
introducing the baby bonus more than a year ago, the
company believes it's see an impact.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Buyong has given out the bonus to about one hundred
employees so far, and they had twenty eight employees last year.
That's about the five people more than the previous three
years on average, and the company thinks the policy did
encourage some people to have babies and Korea, the corporate
(06:23):
culture has been pretty rigid, and it's also construction company
where it's dominated by male employees, mostly so it has
the low and work hours and very paternal estate office culture.
Because they introduced the policy, employees are encouraging each other
to have babies and then get married and beyond a
(06:43):
parent belief, so there is some change in the making.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Jung Ki says Buyong's parents' success has inspired other big companies.
In crea the follow suit, she found dozens of public
and private companies are offering payouts to employees who have babies,
and handouts like these are costing cream companies millions of
dollars a year.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
We put young. It has more to do with the
founders philosophy. He's a patriotic man and he's been saying
he wanted to give back to the society. For other companies,
they see it as part of their corporate social responsibility progress,
and it also helps them bring talent. In the end,
these companies think paying workers right now to have babies
(07:28):
coupe cheaper in the very long term than warning a
business in a country where you have no babies and
no workers to hire.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
But it's unclear if these incentive programs will do that
much to boost Korea's birth rate. That's because baby bonuses
only address one part of the problem expensive childcare and
developed countries, the.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
Decision making about whether and when to have children is
very complex.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Kathleen mogil Guard is the president and CEO of the
Population Institute, nonprofit in Washington, DC that researches population trends.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Often it is about the costs of raising a child,
but there are also a number of personal decisions about timing,
about spacing, about the kinds of relationships we have in
our life, around whether or not we feel like that
is the kind of future that we see for ourselves
and for our families.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Other countries that have introduced baby bonuses have seen only
short lived success in boosting birth rates. Australia and Hungary
provided cash handouts to new parents at various times in
the past two decades, and while they saw an initial
bump in births, their birth rates eventually declined again.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
What we have seen so far is that governments sometimes
invest a lot of resources in these kinds of incentives
and it doesn't move the needle in any significant way
that we have seen so far.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
In Korea, though there are glimmers of hope, the country's
birth rate went up last year for the first time
I'm in a decade, and while it's not clear what
the exact reason was for the uptick or if the
trend will continue, almost all experts agree that handouts aren't
a permanent solution. Structural changes are.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
In places where fertility is dropping very low. That can
serve as a signal to governments to take a look
at what is happening in society that is resulting in
these kinds of extremes in fertility patterns, and that could
invite us to better understand the barriers that they may
(09:35):
be experiencing to achieving their child bearing desires. There may
be things that are playing out in terms of gender equity,
inflexible work policies, or dynamics culturally within the household that
might serve as disincentives for women to have a child
or have another.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Child after the break the economics of declining birth rates
and what could work to persuade people to have more babies.
(10:16):
Although women have been having far fewer babies on average
compared to previous generations, the world's population is still growing overall.
The United Nations says only around sixty countries are seeing
their populations decline, but the population in more than one
hundred and twenty other countries, including the United States, is
still growing and appears on track to keep growing for
(10:40):
the next thirty years.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Even though there is kind of this panic right now
about population decline. We are actually in a period of
continuing population growth for decades to come.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Kathleen Mogilgard from the Population Institute sees it this way.
We're not living in a period of demographic decline, but
demographic diversity.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
The world's population is likely to add another two billion
people through this century. We're currently at about eight point
two billion people globally. Projections from the United Nations indicate
that we are likely to continue to grow through this
century globally to about ten or more billion by the
(11:22):
mid twenty eighties.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
She says, in some ways, the story of the birth
rate decline is actually one of progress.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
There have been more opportunities for women and girls around
the world, an expansion of rights for women and girls
when it comes to education, when it comes to entering
the workforce, and when it comes to accessing the services
and the information that enable women to have agency over
their reproductive lives.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
And new research shows that in places with ultra low
fertility rates like South Korea, gender dynamics have a lot
to do with why women are having fewer kids.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Emerging recent search indicates cultural changes around gender roles and
the greater sharing of household responsibilities and duties between men
and women is something that can be really supportive of
women's decision making about whether to have a child or
to have another child when she can have that assurance
(12:19):
that those responsibilities will be shared equally.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
And while South Korea's fertility incentives and baby bonuses are
aimed at supporting its economy, Kathleen argues countries don't necessarily
need more babies to sustain their economic growth.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
So, for example, in Japan, which has been in population
decline for quite some time, the per capita GDP in
Japan continues on an upward trajectory. So if we're thinking
about what it means to have a healthy economic life
for the individual, there has been continued economic growth on
an individual level even as that country is experiencing population decline.
(13:00):
So the overall economic picture for countries is less about
the number of people but more about kind of economic
productivity within a country, and there are lots of different
ways to stimulate economic productivity. We can invest more in
training and in education for people. We can think about
ways to shift economic systems so that we get greater
(13:23):
output from the same number of people, or fewer numbers
of people.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
To maintain a stable population where there's no growth or decline,
the average woman needs to have roughly two children. Bloomberg's
Jonghi Shin says South Korea is still a long way
short of that number, and even the South Korean government
acknowledges that to close that gap, it'll need more than
a few companies offering baby bonuses.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Their goal is to raise the fertility rate to one
twenty thirty. Right now it's at zero point them stepifive.
The government panel that I interview said you have to
be working five times harder to reach that goal. Experts
say money is a good way to encourage people to
(14:13):
have babies, but you know there has to be more
other issues being resolved. So at smare companies, you might
not get a bonus, but they can be more flexible.
It has to come all together to move them little
and bring about real change.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm
oneh to get more from The Big Take and unlimited
access to all of Bloomberg dot Com, subscribe today at
Bloomberg dot com slash podcast offer. If you liked the episode,
make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take Asia.
Wherever you listen to podcasts, it really helps people find
the show. Thanks for listening, See you next time. A D.
Popular Podcasts
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.