Wesley's Tool-Box

Recent news (in Korean) shows that the population of Naju is returning to one hundred thousand mark some time this month. It's still a far cry from the two hundred forty thousand back in the mid 1960s. But considering that the last time Naju had a 6-digit number of people was 12 years ago and it even dipped below ninety thousand half a decade prior, it's a cause for celebration.

Seriously, the city hall is actually planning to celebrate it. In the meantime, I got curious and dug into the registered population statistics available from the Ministry of the Interior.

As this graph I just compiled from that data shows, the biggest factor in this turnaround is none other than the Bitgaram Innovation City, which was spun off as its own administrative district (Bitgaram-dong) in February 2014 coinciding with the completion of its first apartment complex. The influx of newcomers was clearly evident from the beginning, but it really picked up steam at the end of 2014 when most of the public corporations finished moving into the city, including KPX. Nearly fifteen thousand people have been registered to be living here by the end of last month. Optimistically, the number will hit twenty thousand by the end of the year.

You can also see from the graph that population of the rest of Naju have stagnated or shrunk a bit, so I wondered how much of the growth of Bitgaram City have been translating to the overall population.


For the most part, the population growth of Naju as a whole has been closely trailing that of Bitgaram City. The gap has widened somewhat in the most recent months, suggesting that some people living in the original downtown were more actively moving in to the new town. It still doesn't change the fact that most of the influx are from outside. It should be interesting to see how this will play out in the long run.