hankyoreh

The Korea Institute for Health & Social Affairs, in the process of performing the first survey of conditions faced by the country's poor, estimates that Korea has 5 million poor people. That is far more than the 4.6 million described in the "Urban Household Finances Yearbook" of 2003. The fact that the number accounts for one out of every ten Korean citizens is worrisome enough, but even more serious is that the number is growing.

Looking at the results of the research so far, many of Korea's poor are households headed by women, the elderly, and the handicapped. Those are people for whom it is difficult to find employment or who when employed are discriminated against on the labor market. Recently poverty has been on the rise as wages go down. Actual earned income for low-income households working in urban areas has dropped significantly over the past two years.

Individuals have responsibility to bear about their poverty, but everything should not be blamed on the individual, either. The capitalist market does not give everyone who has the will and ability to work the opportunity to do so. Other problems are that you are not compensated in accordance with how much you work. There exists a need to take note of the market-first thinking that places so much importance on short-term efficiency and that has spread since the financial crisis of 1997, and how the number of poor has increased at the same time. The growth of poverty also functions as a factor in the Korean economy's difficulty in getting out of the stagnation in domestic spending.

Over the long run it will be necessary to correct the system so that distribution takes place in a balanced fashion. But since the problem cannot be resolved with that alone, taxation needs to be used with the aim of income redistribution in order to increase aid for the country's poor. There also needs to be support for those in the government's official classification of poverty that is essentially the same as absolute poverty. It is backwards for the Grand National Party (GNP) to be opposing the government and ruling party's plans to increase social welfare spending by 9 percent a year. It must be realized that the lack of a social security system is an indirect cause of the spread of poverty.

The Hankyoreh, 26 May 2005.


[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]