The second city of South Korea is afraid of demographic disaster

Eh Seo was born and grew up in South Luka South Korea, but she never doubted she would study and work elsewhere.

“Not only my parents, but all parents wanted their children to move to Seoul,” said SEO, 32, who left South KoreaThe second largest city is immediately after high school and is now working in the capital. “And I wanted to go and I have no regret.”

Most of the 20th century Busan was the advanced center of trade and industry. But the city is now in the exodus of young people who left it faster than any other metropolitan area in a country that already has the lowest fertility rate in the world.

Located on the southeastern top of the Korean peninsula just across the street from Japan, Busan’s wealth has worsened since the 1990s because the local industry is suffering from South Korea’s transition to the high-tech industrial economy.

Korea for Employment Information, Government Agency, officially classified bouquet last year as “risk of extinction”-when the imbalance between the working and non-working population makes the city economically unsustainable.

The city of 3.3 million threw out 600,000 people between 1995 and 2023. Demographs warn that this trend is accelerated because the city population is old, and Seul has been surrounding its intervention over the economy of the country.

Busan retains both charms and assets – mountains and beaches, temples and nightlife, famous film and art festivals and the proximity of Japan and industrial centers that gathered along the eastern coast of South Korea.

Although it was the birthplace of the leading Samsung and LG conglomerates, none of the 100 largest companies of South Korea is headquartered in the city.

“Young outfathers are getting bigger,” Seo said. “Every time I come back, I see how losing vitality loses.”

Busan flourished in the second half of the 19th century due to the proximity of Japan – the Bridge for the first for Japanese trade and investment, and later for colonization.

Japanese industrials set up factories in Busan, producing cheap goods ranging from rubber and shoes to wood. After a defeat in Tokyo in World War II, the factories took over the Koreans, and Buzan received a rush of returnees from Japan.

Invision of North Korea from 1950 was encouraged by the second wave of arrivals after the South Korean government temporarily withdrew from Seoul to Busan. Between 1945 and 1951, the city population increased from 280,000 to 840,000.

Busan benefited from the “National Development Strategy” in the 1960s and 70s that built an industrial corridor between IT and Seoul, and Busan’s Luka served as the main trade center for the export-oriented economy.

However, the wealth of the city turned as South Korea went on to produce cheap goods of wide consumption in which Busan factories specialized.

The Korean economy, which is increasingly triggered by the production and exports of sophisticated goods, is shown to the Samsung Electronics sector production facilities on the periphery of Seoul.

Universities and research institutes migrated to satisfy demand for qualified workers. Incheon Luka on the west coast – closer to Seoul, and more appropriate for trading with cinema – replaced bouquet as a leading export center in the country.

“Construction governments continued national centralization policies as a way of maximizing efficiency to compete with Japan and China,” said Deputy Mayor Busan Lee Jun-Seung. “We’re left.”

Lee Sang-ho, a researcher at the State Employment Information Service, known as Keis, said that centralization pushed Busan and other South Korean regional economic centers in the “Lancan Reaction” deteriorated by intensifying competition from China.

“Most of the main provincial cities outside the city area in the country are experiencing a similar phenomenon,” Lee said. “Rural areas with small populations were the first, followed by small and medium -sized cities, and now they hit metropolitan areas like Busan.”

He added that although many young men from Busan were still able to find production tasks in other industrial centers in the southeast, women are more likely to have to go to Seoul to find a job in the sector sector.

Local civic groups claim that the fall of the city has worsened poor management management.

Lee Seung-Han, General of the Social Welfare Secretary of Social Welfare, Busan Civic Group, said that instead of identifying new growth areas for the local economy in the 1990s, a consecutive mayor was selling public land on the outskirts of the city to the programmers. The sale was fed with a flourishing property, driven by money from foreigners who buy luxury apartments on the coast as investments.

The result, Lee said, was the benefit of the older owners of real estate to the detriment of young people who are not yet in the ladder of the apartments, expanding the generational gap in wealth and aggravating young people to live in the city.

“They acted more like property developers than mayor,” Lee said. “Busan literally means” many mountains, “but now we call it” the city of many apartments. “

Lee Sang-ho from Keis noted that the suburbs of Busan Beach of Haeundae, which was developed as part of the real estate flourishing in the 1990s and is known as “Copacabana from Korea”, is one of the city’s most extinction departments to extinct the extinction of the risk index. The index is based on the ratio of female residents between the ages of 20 and 39 and the population of the age of 65.

“[Haeundae] is a place where high ups are gathering, but young people cannot afford to live there, “Lee said.” Most local people live behind high climbs in underdeveloped areas, because the city is becoming polarized. “

However, Deputy Mayor Lee Jun-Seau said that in the 1980s and 1990s, the main problem of the city was a lack of residential, industrial land and appropriate transport connections.

Observers noted that even Seoul, who suited young people from all over the country, faced their own demographic crisis as they respond to brutal competition for well -paid jobs and education by giving up marriage and parenting.

At 0.72, the fertility rate of South Korea – an average number of children who are expected to be born in her life – was the lowest in the world in 2023. But despite attracting young people from all over the country, the Seoul 2023 fertility rate was even lower – 0.55. OECD believes that fertility rate of 2.1 is required to ensure a widely stable population.

“Although Busan’s population is expected to decrease by 33.57 percent between 2020 and 2050, it is expected that the Seoul population will decrease by 21.45 percent in the same period,” said the head of the Kim Assessment Center. Se-Hyun at the Busan Development Institute Busan at the Busan Institute of Development.

“The difference is that in Busan there will be far greater decrease in the population in working age as a proportion of the population as a whole,” said Kim, adding that despite the fall, the city was left with literal “extinction” extremely distant.

Economists say that the decline in regional economies is increasing, because the centralized model of South Korea is no longer supplied with the type of GDP growth, which is required to alleviate the effects of the demographic crisis crisis.

Korea Bank has reduced GDP growth projection by 2025 to 1.6-1.7 percent, which is less than 2.3 percent less than a year earlier.

Central Bank governor Rhee Chang-Yong told the Financial Times Last year, “drastic solutions”, including a limit to a university reception from the most important neighborhoods in Seoul, were needed to encourage people to leave Seoul and return to provincial areas.

Busan’s Deputy Mayor Lee Jun-Seau said the city needed higher autonomy, including the devolution of the regulatory powers of the financial sector to attract qualified young workers.

He also said that immigration was “crucial”, presenting plans for special regional visas for students and qualified workers from Southeast Asia.

But Lee Sang-ho from Keis said that without repairing the fundamental problem of the unbalanced regional development of immigrants, they would simply move to Seoul.

Political Class of the Earth, still disturbed by the relegation of President Yoon Suka Yela Published Declaration on Martial Law in DecemberHe showed a little sign to be able to provide deeply rooted restructuring of the Earth’s economy.

Meanwhile, bouncing like Yang Mi-Sook, leader of a group for the campaign of local citizens, complaining about the fall of the city because thousands still leave every month.

“It’s so sad and frustrating,” she said. “The Government should admit that we have a serious problem – after all, without other citizens, we will not need politicians either.”