South Korea looks to foreign workers to solve demographic crisis

TOKYO -- With South Korea's fertility rate falling at the world's fastest pace and 280 trillion won ($212 billion) or so in government spending over the past 15 years doing little to arrest the decline, one of the world's most ethnically homogenous nations is now recruiting more workers from overseas.

At least partly because of the fertility crisis, one expert predicts that populous Indonesia and Nigeria will overtake South Korea in terms of economic size by 2050, pushing the East Asian nation out of the group of the 15 biggest economies. Another pessimistic view has it that South Korea might disappear as a nation by 2750 if the number of children continues to fall at the current pace.