Population Change and Social Mobility in South Korea

Fertility decline in South Korea during the second half of the 20th century was dramatic. The total fertility rate (TFR) fluctuated around 6.0 until the 1960s, but has rapidly declined since then. The TFR dropped below the replacement level (2.1) in 1983, and has continued declining. According to World Health Statistics 2008 (World Health Organization 2008), the TFR in South Korea was 1.2 in 2007, which is the lowest among the countries examined. Now, South Korea is considered as one of the "lowest low fertility" countries (Kohler et al. 2002). This dramatic decline coincided with rapid socioeconomic changes such as industrialization, urbanization, and educational expansion. Although socioeconomic development is associated with fertility decline in most industrialized countries (Coale 1978; Bryant 2007), the Korean experience is notable because of the extremely rapid pace of fertility decline and socioeconomic development. This simultaneous transformation of several aspects of social life is one of the most important features of "compressed modernization" in South Korea (Chang 1999). In this study, I examine how demographic changes intertwined with social inequality under such a rapid socio-demographic transformation in South Korea.;The first chapter examines recent trends in fertility decline in South Korea. I attempt to answer a long-standing demographic question using a unique Korean experience: is fertility change driven by long-term cohort change or fluctuating period change? By using a classic age-period-cohort model, a moment decomposition method and a new summary fertility measure, 'cross-sectional average fertility (CAF)', I show that fertility change is primarily driven by period change and that delayed childbearing has important consequences for the onset of fertility decline. These findings are consistent with sociological accounts of fertility changes in Western countries: 1) temporal variations that cut across cohorts (e.g., economic cycles) are more important than shared socializing experiences within cohorts and 2) the onset of the fertility transition is driven by delays in childbearing.;The second chapter examines educational differentials in the timing of first marriage and first childbearing. To do this, I estimate multi-state life tables and Cox proportional hazard models using the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS). The analyses show that both educational expansion and growing educational differentials contribute to the delay of first marriage and first birth. Simulation and decomposition analysis shows that growing educational differentials are more important than compositional change in explaining delays in first marriage and childbearing. This implies that growing opportunity costs of marriage and childbearing, as well as lack of institutional adjustments to women's labor market participation, are responsible for the delay in marriage and childbearing in Korea.;Using a multi-group population projection model, the third chapter examines the implications of educational mobility and differential demographic rates on changing educational distribution in South Korea. This article focuses on the implications of differential population renewal process on educational mobility. First, differential demographic rates are found to have no substantial influence on the educational distribution because of substantial educational mobility. Second, intergenerational association and structural change matter in the long run: stronger intergenerational association and more structural change leads to rising women's education. Finally, social mobility and differential fertility are found to be interdependent processes that jointly influence differential population replacement.;The fourth examines the intergenerational effects of changes in women's educational distribution in South Korea. Departing from the conventional approach in research on social stratification, we examine the effects of changes in women's educational attainment in one generation on the educational distribution of the next generation. Using a simulation method based on a recursive population renewal model (Mare and Maralani 2006), we examine how intergenerational transmission, assortative mating, and differential fertility influence intergenerational effects. We find that the magnitude of intergenerational effects substantially depends on how marriage behaviors respond to changing women's educational distribution. When assortative mating patterns correspond to the changes in women's educational distribution, the intergenerational effects are amplified substantially. By contrast, differential fertility is not an important component of intergenerational effects. Intergenerational effects become weaker across cohorts, which is a consequence of educational expansion. To assess the sampling variability of estimates of intergenerational effects, we apply a bootstrap method.