hankyoreh

By Kim So-youn, staff reporter

More and more baby boomers born between 1955 and 1963 started their own businesses last year, while new business ownership was down among younger people, Statistics Korea data show.

Many of the new businesses were small wholesale and retail operations, which typically have low barriers to entry.

Tentative findings from a national business survey, released on Sept. 26 by Statistics Korea, showed a total of 3,679,000 businesses across the country as of late 2013, an increase of 2.1% (76,000) from one year before. The number of employees also rose 2.8% to 19,090,000, an increase of 525,328 jobs.

Ownership rates grew for people in their fifties (a rise of 11.4%), sixties and older (4.4%), and forties (1%), but dropped by 18.1% for people aged 30-39 and 9.9% for those aged 20-29. The largest single segment of businesses - 38% - had a “baby boomer” owner in his or her fifties.

Wholesale and retail sales made up the largest portion of the increase, at 24.2%. Next in line were manufacturing (16.9%) and food/accommodations (16.3%).

By workforce scale, workplaces with 5 to 99 employees saw the biggest increase between 2012 and 2013, a rise of 5.4%.

“As more and more baby boomers retire and start their own businesses, we’re finding a big increase in the number of workplaces with owners in their fifties, places that are small to medium in scale, and places involved in wholesale/retail, accommodations, and food,” said a Statistics Korea official.

Women accounted for more and more ownership and staff positions - a sign of their growing presence the economy in general. The number of female employees was tallied at 8,047,000, an increase of 273,000 (3.5%) from one year before, while the number of male employees stood at 11,048,000, up by 252,000, or 2.3%. Women represented 42.1% of business owners, for a 0.2 percentage point increase, with increases observed across all industry categories except accommodations/restaurants and mining.

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