Korean County Achieves Its Goal: Less Birth Control, More Babies

They knew the replacement rate was 2.1 babies and still consciously pushed the birth rate far below that. Now they are aggressively pushing it in the other direction.

It's almost as if the government agency in charge of manipulating the population always needs to have something to do. They couldn't just say, "We've achieved our goal of 2 kids per family. Let's go home!"

I suspect that the new initiative to increase the birth rate will drive it to at least 3 births per couple, and then there will be a new expensive initiative to reduce it again. That is how you create jobs.

There's a mildly amusing movie about the '70s Korean government's attempt to reduce population growth in a rural village: http://asianwiki.com/Mission_Sex_Control It shows some of the concepts that resulted in the stunted growth they're addressing in the above linked article.

Nowadays the main issue appears to be that daycare is simply not affordable for the average young Korean couple, which is why you may see children still being raised by their grandparents instead. If the family is too far away, then the mother may give up her job until the children have entered school.