ABSTRACT
In Korea, the end of the Korean War (1950-53) was greeted by a jump in the number of births. Together with their parents, the baby boomers became the locomotive of rapid industrialization and today’s economic miracle. Affluence and democratization enabled and urged successive Korean governments to introduce old-age income support programmes such that relatively quickly the nation was equipped with multi-pillar pension schemes comparable to those of advanced European welfare states (see Chapters 2, 5 and 11). Although the pension schemes are more rudimentary and immature than their European counterparts, Koreans, until recently, were optimistic that these would further develop and afford a comfortable retirement for most. Indeed, it was this sense of optimism that in part had fuelled the period of rapid economic and political development of the past decades. However, the end of soaring economic growth since the late 1990s accompanied by falling fertility rates signals that not a rosy, but rather a grey, future is awaiting. Owing to an alarming drop in its birth rate, as well as a rapidly ageing population, Korea will be one of the greyest countries within a few decades (see Chapters 1 and 3).
