The Pandemic's Long Reach: South Korea's Fiscal and Fertility Outlook

Jacob Kirkegaard

No PB21-16, Policy Briefs from Peterson Institute for International Economics

Abstract: South Korea was one of the first countries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. A combination of high societal discipline and competent and prompt government actions on mass testing capacity and technologically enabled tracing and quarantines enabled South Korea to quickly control the pandemic. Consequently, South Korea did not need to enter into full economic lockdown in early 2020 and needed only much smaller fiscal stimulus than most other advanced economies. The limited fiscal impact of COVID-19 is fortuitous for South Korea, as the pandemic coincided with the country’s dramatic demographic transition to a future of rapidly shrinking working-age population and accelerating overall aging. South Korea recorded the lowest total fertility rate of any advanced economy in 2020. Unless fertility rates rise, the country will not escape large and negative economic effects from what will be a rapidly declining total and working-age population. Kirkegaard proposes several policy reforms for South Korea, while arguing that the direct role of government action in increasing the South Korean fertility levels is likely to be modest.

Date: 2021-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/pa ... nd-fertility-outlook (text/html)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/pandemics-long-reach-south-koreas-fiscal-and-fertility-outlook [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/2021/pandemics-long-reach-south-koreas-fiscal-and-fertility-outlook)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iie:pbrief:pb21-16

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Briefs from Peterson Institute for International Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peterson Institute webmaster ().