Do the Koreans Have a Future?

We’re all familiar with many of the ways in which the lives of North and South Koreans differ.  The Economist has published an interesting new piece describing some of these way, but which eventually focuses on the demographics of both nations and the greater region.  No doubt, from those differences arise very different reasons why the populations of both nations are declining.

As to why the South’s population is declining at one of the fastest rates in the OECD, it’s largely because women are waiting longer to have kids.

The reason for the North’s population decline is necessarily more a matter of conjecture, though the conjecture leads in some obvious directions when we speak of a nation that’s been in or barely out of famine for more than a decade.  I’m currently reading Nick Eberstadt’s “The North Korean Economy,” and have just gotten though a chapter in which he discusses how few of the official statistics add up, either economically or demographically.  He tracks how the North Koreans first excluded the military population from the official population statistics, thus leading to a severe gender imbalance in the remaining population.  Eberstadt suspects, but doesn’t go so far as to allege, that the North Koreans subsequently monkeyed with the male or female stats to reduce that imbalance and thus conceal the size of their military.  Thus, experts variously estimate the population of North Korea to be anywhere from 18 million to 23 million.

So put those reports of a new North Korean census into context.

Eberstadt is quoted as a source in the Economist piece as well.  It’s too bad that the article offers less explanation of why the North’s population is declining, or whether it really is.  In his book, however, Eberstadt suspects that the regime has understated its infant mortality rate.  My own suspicion is that hungry people try not to have any more children, and that the children who are born are less likely to survive the first years of their lives.

A final point to which I’d like to draw your notice is the demographic decline of the Korean population of northeast China, suggesting the possible abolition of its Korean Autonomous Zone and the effective absorption of its Korean population into the Han population.  Who else can foresee something similar gradually happening to a Chinese-occupied North Korea … and eventually, the South?
Hat tip to a reader.