Economic Growth, Demographic Change and Housing Transformation in Korea

South Korea, one of Asia’s most successful developmentalist state, has marked rapid economic growth and shown fast recovery from economic crises. The state at an early stage of economic development necessarily implemented industrialization and urbanization, and at a later stage experienced democratization and globalization. A series of the process has been inevitably accompanied with demographic change that was particularly striking after the emergence of global capitalism. The most notable features of the changing demography include ageing population, declining birth rate, a wide arrange of new household types, and reduction in household size. The demographic transitions have been so obvious to transform housing system. This study is to look into the relationship between economic growth and demographic change, and to examine how these affect and are affected by housing transformation. In doing so, wide arrays of national data are used, and it’s obvious that housing norms (e.g., structure type, tenure, size and expenditure) are changed to react to the needs of major actors changing the state’s demography – the elderly, single persons and baby boomers. Therefore, the conventional path for traditional families toward homeownership is no longer ensured, and the recent economic downturn concerns housing affordability.