Abstract
Korea fertility level has dropped since the 1960's and speed of decline has accelerated in the 1980's. In the resuls, the growth rate reached to less then 1 percent in 1990 and will be $\ulcorner$0 $\lrcorner$ percent growth in 2021. The total population will increase to 50, 586 thousand persons in 2021 then will decrease. With the rapid fertility decline the age structure of Korean population has changed : while the proportion of child population aged 0-14 is decreasing sharply, that of old-age population aged 65 and over is increasing. Because of the recent increase of sex ratio at birth, the sex structure among the young generation has been destorted; the sex ratio at age 0-4 was as high as high as 112.0 in 1990. The effects of these population phenomena on Korean society are the followings: 1) Old age dependency ratio is increasing rapidly and continuously and will be about 40.0 from the 2050's. 2) Because of the rapid decline of the number of births, the absolute number of the major labour force at age 25-34 will decrease after around 2000 and then from the 2010's become less than that in 1990. 3) Since the large fertility defferentials by womens's educational level have continued and the relation between the educational levels of mothers and children are very strong, level has dropped among higher educated women first when the average fertility level has declined in Korea, the average educational level of the children is may be expected to be relatively low and then the future productivity is will be also low, which causes the decline of 'quality of population. 4) When the high sex ratio at birth (over 110 since 1986) continues, number of brides will be short by over 20 percent from the 2010s, which will bring various kinds of social prblems. Therefore, the counter measures in concrete to relieve the heavy problems are recommended as follows: 1) The extention of the birth intervals, which helps to drop the population growth rate at the same level of number of children per women. 2) The positive supports for out-migrants, which helps to reduce the population size without any destortion of age-sex structure. 3) The defferent supports of family planning for the higher and lower classes, which helps to reduce the gaps between different ferility levels of the classes and to keep and improve the quality of population. 4)population education for both students and adults, which helps to minimize the gap between the private and public requirements.
