Regional Extinction Destroys the Very Fabric of Korea's Economy
Analysis shows that more than half of the nation's territory has entered the stage of extinction risk. The depopulation of regional areas and overcrowding in the capital region, experts point out, is a crisis that shakes the entire South Korean economy, going beyond the problems of individual municipalities. This diagnosis comes from a column co-written by Kwon Eui-jong, a Ph.D. in business administration and economics and finance columnist who co-chairs the Seoul Economy Forum, and Lee Wang-ro, a Ph.D. in science and energy and education policy expert who served as a professor at Jeonbuk National University. It analyzes regional extinction not as a demographic issue but as one of economic disintegration.
The regional extinction risk index is calculated by dividing the population of women aged 20-39, those of childbearing age, by the population aged 65 or older, and serves as an indicator of whether a region can sustain its own population. The shadow of extinction, as measured by this index, is no longer confined to remote rural villages or township-level areas. It is eroding even metropolitan hub cities in the provinces and small and mid-sized cities with long histories. Cities where the inflow of young women has ceased and only the elderly remain lose their reproductive capacity, lacking a childbearing population. As the minimum population scale needed to sustain a city collapses, a growing number of cities, counties, and districts cannot even secure the tax revenue needed to support basic infrastructure. As populations shrink, administrative services and quality of life deteriorate, triggering a vicious cycle in which even the remaining residents leave.
The rising extinction risk index manifests as the collapse of living infrastructure. As effective demand hits rock bottom, small business owners and the self-employed continue to vacate their shops and leave. The old downtown districts of provincial cities are covered in red rental banners, while convenience infrastructure such as large supermarkets, cinemas, and cultural facilities rapidly disappear. Regions where a city's minimal lifestyle infrastructure has been destroyed are no longer perceived as viable places to live for young people.
An even greater blow is the cascading collapse of public infrastructure such as healthcare and education. As the number of children declines, local elementary, middle, and high schools are undergoing a chain of closures. When the educational foundation collapses, parents raising children have no choice but to leave the city in search of better educational environments. Obstetricians and pediatric clinics disappeared long ago, and even regional general hospitals with emergency rooms are closing due to difficulties hiring doctors and financial troubles. The collapse of these basic survival infrastructures—commerce, healthcare, and education—accelerates population outflow in turn.
The root cause of this cascading collapse, the analysis finds, is the so-called metropolitan black hole phenomenon, in which jobs and infrastructure are concentrated exclusively in the capital region. In a structure where quality jobs, prestigious universities, and cultural and medical infrastructure are densely packed into the metropolitan area, young people in the provinces turn their backs on their hometowns for survival. As talent cultivated in regional areas continues to drain away, this exodus weakens the competitiveness of local businesses and reduces the number of quality jobs.
The two authors point out that regional extinction sharply reduces the efficiency of land use and increases the national financial burden of maintaining abandoned regional infrastructure. They also argue that young people crowding into the capital region give up on having children amid high housing costs and fierce competition—a situation linked to the metropolitan overcrowding dragging the nation's total fertility rate down to the 0.6 range.
