hankyoreh

May 31. (by Kim Sung-gwang

By Ryu Yi-geun, staff reporter

The top 100 income tax payers earned 1,523 times the median income for South Koreans, while accounting for just over five percent of taxes paid on all taxable income. The values reflect payment of both taxes on both wages and business income.

Economic Reform Research Institute (ERRI) released a report on June 12 indicating the income of the top 100 taxpayers for all taxable integrated income, including both earned income and comprehensive income minus duplicates, amounted to 1,523 the median value. The median is arrived at when all of the country’s 14.1 million integrated income earners are ranked in order of income size. The study also found the next-highest earning 900 income tax payers making 301 times the median value, with the following 9,000 making 75 times and the next 90,000 earning 19 times as much. The average income for the top 100,000 earners was slightly more than 28 times the median.

Kim Sang-jo, the Hansung University professor of economics in charge of the analysis says, “It is time for us to adopt policies aimed at bringing up the median income rather than the average income, in other words, policies focused on the lower income segments.”

For the study, the ERRI conducted a reexamination of 2007 using tax data on the 12 income percentiles and the incomes of the top 100,000 earners. The data was acquired from the National Tax Service through the office of New Politics Alliance for Democracy Lawmaker Hong Jong-haak.

Kim noted that the income gap has shrunk slightly after growing through 2011, but added, “Income distribution conditions in 2012 were worse than they had been in 2007.”

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]