Poverty Becomes Harder to Overcome

from The Korea Times

By Lee Hyo-sik
Staff Reporter

Even children born to poor families had chances to overcome poverty and upgrade their social status through diligence and thrift in the past, but these days, the widening income disparity between rich and poor has made such a scenario a thing of the past amid the tight job market.

The world’s 11th largest economy has become a place in which the poor face increasing difficulties in getting out of poverty as the expanding income and education gap have almost deprived the have-nots of opportunities to create a self-made success story, according to a report released Tuesday by the LG Economic Research Institute.

The report said about 26.5 percent of the households, which fell into ``relative poverty,’’ tided it over within a year in 2004. A household in relative poverty is defined as the one that earns less than the half of the average income of a household.

In 2003, nearly 30 percent of such households succeeded in escaping from poverty, down from 38.4 percent in 2002, indicating it had become more difficult for households to overcome economic hardship and reenter the mainstream of society, once they fell into poverty.

``Because of the widening income gap, which leads to disparities in education and other opportunities, more poor households have become unable to upgrade their economic and social status,’’ said Cho Yong-soo, a senior researcher at the institute.

He said education-spending differences between the haves and have-nots and the sluggish job market are the largest obstacle facing the poor in escaping from poverty.

Last year, the top 10 percent of high-income households spent a monthly average of 311,000 won ($334) on private education, including tutoring and language study, more than nine times the 34,000 won spent by the bottom 10 percent, according to the National Statistical Office (NSO).

Children of high income brackets who receive a range of private tutoring on top of formal schooling are more likely to perform better on tests and enter prestigious universities. Students graduating from top schools have a higher chance to become a more privileged member of society, such as a doctor, lawyer or public official.

The report also found that the poor households headed by the elderly had an even lower chance of getting out of poverty, compared to those headed by younger people, as older workers have a harder time finding a job.

Only 16.5 percent of households, which fell into the relative poverty in 2003, escaped from that status in 2004, down from 23.7 percent the previous year.

The report suggested that the government needs to establish a better social safety net for elderly households and create an environment in which senior citizens can get a job more easily so that they can earn money and maintain a descent standard of living.