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One way to boost the skilled labour force might be to have rather more people working rather fewer hours. The extra people would be women, often highly educated ones. Quite a lot of Korean women stay at home—the participation rate for women aged 25-54 is only 62%, the fourth-lowest in the OECD—even though they are usually better educated than men. In almost all rich countries, the best-educated women are more likely to work than their less-educated sisters. Not in South Korea.
Shorter hours might encourage some of these skilled women into the workforce. So might a change in attitudes to schooling. The job of supervising a child’s education falls to women, which is one of the reasons why relatively few women have jobs.
This does not mean that they have a lot of children instead. Korea has a fertility rate of 1.2, one of the lowest in the OECD. This is in part because those good educations make having children a pricey proposition. An unusually large part of the spending that makes Korean education so good is private, not public. The government spends just under 5% of GDP on education, slightly below the rich-country average.
Families add an extra 2.8% of GDP on top of that, easily the highest rate in the OECD. At universities, family spending is three times that of the state. And families spend an estimated 8% of their household budgets on after-hours programmes for each child, an investment which explains the effort mothers put into making sure it pays off. If you have three children, their after-school activities alone could swallow up a quarter of the household budget.

A. 어휘
skilled labour force 숙련 노동력. rather=a little.
participation rate (노동시장) 참여비율. supervising 감독하다.
relatively 상대적으로. fertility rate 출산율. pricey 값비싼.
proposition 상품, 일, 제안, 命題(명제). average 평균.
estimated 평가되는. household budgets 가계예산.
after-hours programmes 근무시간 이후의(방과 후의) 프로그램.
pays off 성과가 나다. swallow up 집어 삼키다. a quarter=1/4.