A report by South Korea's central bank said hiring overseas laborers in nursing and child care would be inevitable, considering the imbalance between supply and demand, as well as the rising burden of expenses.

In the report on Tuesday, the Bank of Korea(BOK) estimated shortage of workers in care service for the elderly to surge from 190-thousand in 2022 to up to one-point-55 million in 2042 amid the rapidly aging society.

With demand for child care services also on the rise due to dual-income households, a pessimistic estimate for labor supply in both care services for seniors and children in 2042 stood at only 30 percent of demand.

The BOK said the monthly average cost of hiring a caretaker at nursing homes was three-point-seven million won, or two-thousand-770 U.S. dollars, as of 2023, around one-point-seven times the monthly income for median income households among seniors.

Hiring a babysitter for ten hours a day, it costs an average two-point-64 million won per month as of last year, over 50 percent of monthly income of median income families in their 30s.

Stating that such cost burden deprives families of experiencing high-quality care services and restricts women's economic participation, which ultimately lead to low births, the BOK called to seek ways to reduce wages of foreign laborers for an actual cost reduction.