Abstract
Background: Poverty in Korea is not gender neutral. Both male headed and female headed households experience poverty in distinct ways. This research discusses poverty and how it has evolved in Korea from a gender perspective. Methods: It describes the characteristics of poverty among the working population based on gender and other household attributes. It measures poverty relative to the mean and median incomes of the population in three ways: headcount, poverty gap, and poverty severity. The study uses the probit model to estimate the incidence of poverty and the Heckman sample selection model to analyze poverty’s gap and severity. Our empirical results are based on an unbalanced household level panel covering the period 2006–2016. Results: Our results indicate that multiple factors including issues related to the labor market and demographic characteristics contribute to women’s poverty. Within the working population, women are less likely to be poor than men because they share their partners’ incomes. However, single female workers with children are the poorest demographic group. Conclusion: “Part-time jobs” are a critical factor in determining women’s poverty status, while “work years” and “the quality of occupation” have a crucial impact on the incidence and severity of poverty.
Highlights
South Korea has experienced unprecedented economic growth in the past few decades because of improvements in the country’s educational and organizational standards
“feminization of poverty”, more than 70% of the elderly and more than half of the poor households in the U.S were headed by women in the 1970s
Seok (2004) analyzed the phenomena of the feminization of poverty and the gender poverty gap in Korea using a survey of urban households (1996–2002) and a survey of household consumption
Summary
South Korea has experienced unprecedented economic growth in the past few decades because of improvements in the country’s educational and organizational standards. Korean society has been suffering from socioeconomic inequalities and poverty because of rapid economic growth and the government prioritizing manufacturing, conglomerates, and highly urbanized regions in allocating the capital generated This has led to a gap between industries, businesses, regions, and social classes. Women in the working age population are poorer than men even though their educational levels are not significantly different from the men This contradicts the expectation that a good quality education leads to a higher level of labor productivity and improvements in living standards.
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