ИСТИНА

The challenge of urban shrinkage consisting rapid population and economic decline is nowadays quite actual even for such highly developed country like the Republic of Korea. This paper, examined demographical problems of its shrinking cities, has been established that not increasing natural population decline, but the large migration outflow was the main demographic driver for urban shrinkage. The dominance of working-age population, especially youth in out migration flows from shrinking cities determined their older and more misbalanced sex structure in comparison with the national one by reason of which local men actively marry foreign brides. The study of shrinking cities as a sample area proposes as an important step of settlement of depopulation problem, which will be challenging the country soon, and the immigration of foreign Koreans is suggested as one of the possible solutions.