Trend Population decline is spreading to Korea's non-capital regions and their metropolitan hubs

Summary

Korea's first wave of public agency relocation was designed in the early 2000s, when both the capital region and the rest of the country were still gaining residents. That premise no longer holds, because the national population has been shrinking since 2020 and the non-capital regions entered absolute decline around 2019. Every non-capital metropolitan city has now joined this decline, and official projections show the losses widening toward 2045. The report stresses that the spatial concentration of decline is more worrying than the national total, since regional metropolitan cities once acted as a dam that held back outflows to the capital. If that buffer weakens, young people from small cities and rural areas may move straight to the capital region without stopping in regional hubs.