Population change and its components in Korea, 1925-1966

Abstract

In Korea, the study of population as an independent specialized knowledge, is a relatively new field having started about ten years ago. On the initiation of the family planning program in 1962 and the establishment of several population research institutes around 1965, the study of population has been greatly encouraged and developed. Although there were some studies on the Korean population before 1960, even in the 1930s, they were mostly either studied by foreign scholars, whose main interests were not in the Korean population, or approached from various fields other than demography such as medicine, biology, economics, sociology and so forth. Some of these studies provide very valuable information about the population development in Korea, but they were inevitably confined to only a particular aspect of population phenomena and cannot be reconciled with the entire context of Korean demography. Moreover, they were mostly descriptive and lacking in technical analysis with exceptions of a series of works by I.B. Taeuber and some mortality studies through life table construction.