PovertyRateandPovertyLineinKorea.pdfVIP

Poverty Rate and Poverty Line in Korea Neung-Hoo Park * April 30 – May 3 *Senior Research Fellow Korea Institute for Health Social Affairs Poverty Rate and Poverty Line in Korea Neung-Hoo Park I. Introduction When the economic shock hit Korea in November 1997 researchers of social policy worried about its adverse effects on the life of poor people. Since then many researchers argued that the poverty rate increased rapidly and the income distribution got worse. To prove their argument researchers measured poverty rates by their own criteria and method. However, Korea faces some limitations in producing poverty rate every year. Korean government produces the national income data covering the whole population every five years. Thus, researchers cannot calculate a national poverty rate each year. If private researchers want to measure the poverty rate every year, they should first conduct nation-wide survey with their own budget, which is hardly possible because it would involve a large amount of cost. Many researchers, however, tried to measure the poverty rate for each year or for each quarter using other complementary data sets, although the data sets did not supply the proper information. Hence, different poverty rates have been presented by different researchers. The primary objective of this paper is to review the poverty rates measured by several researchers. The review will make it clear that Korea should produce a new data set to measure an accurate poverty rate. The secondary objective of this paper is to