A girl walks previous a barbershop in Yeongyang, a county in North Gyeongsang Province, on this Sept. 7, 2021, file photograph. Yeongyang, a sleepy county with a inhabitants of simply 15,000, is looking for to host refugees from Myanmar amid its demographic cliff. Korea Instances photograph by Cheong Kwang-jin
Yeongyang, a sleepy county with a inhabitants of simply 15,000 in North Gyeongsang Province, is looking for to host refugees from Myanmar amid its demographic cliff.
In accordance with the county workplace on Friday, its officers and people on the Ministry of Justice had been discussing the coverage thought of inviting 40 folks from the war-torn Southeast Asian nation to considered one of its villages and serving to them settle there as a part of efforts to handle the difficulty of its shrinking variety of residents.
If it goes as deliberate, 10 households of the Karen folks, an ethnolinguistic group that primarily resides in southeastern Myanmar, can be invited to the county later this yr.
Yeongyang has the bottom variety of residents amongst counties in Korea, excluding islands.
The determine, which was increased than 70,000 within the early Nineteen Seventies, has steadily decreased for many years. Its inhabitants fell by greater than half in 20 years and dropped down to fifteen,271 in February 2025. Officers fear the determine will drop under 15,000 by the top of the yr.
Lately, officers have taken measures to reverse the pattern, increasing direct money help for infants born within the county, amongst different incentives. Regardless of this, the variety of residents who die annually is much better than these born. In accordance with officers, solely about 25 infants are born there yearly.
