SEOUL, President Yoon Suk Yeol instructed his aides Tuesday to come up with tax benefits and other support measures to encourage companies to formulate birth incentive programs for their employees, his office said.

Booyoung Group, a South Korean builder, recently said it will provide employees with 100 million won (US$75,000) per birth to help boost the country’s record-low birthrate.

The company said it had already delivered a combined 7 billion won to 70 employees, either man or woman, who had one child or more since January 2021, but in the form of a “gift,” not “earned income,” to reduce their tax burden.

Yoon said the growing trend among companies making similar efforts is “quite encouraging” and instructed his aides to “immediately devise tax benefits and other various support measures to vitalize companies’ voluntary birth promotion plans,” according to his spokesperson Kim Soo-kyung.

South Korea’s fertility rate– the number of children that are expected to be born to a woman over her lifetime —
hit a record low of 0.78 in 2022, far below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to maintain the country’s population at 51 million.

Source: Yonhap News Agency