Only 1.9% respond they belong to high-income bracket


A survey by a local think tank showed that about half of Koreans classified themselves as members of the low-income class with little expectation for advancing to higher strata.

In the poll of 1,011 adults across the nation, 50.1 percent said they belong to the low-income bracket, more than triple the actual share announced by the government, Hyundai Research Institute reported on Sunday.

Statistics Korea said last year that low-income households, whose disposable income is less than half of the median income, account for 15.2 percent of the country’s households.

Of the self-described poor, 34.6 percent said they have always been in the low-income bracket, while 15.5 percent said they were previously middle class, according to the HRI survey.

Some 46.4 percent said they thought of themselves as middle class, less than the 64 percent calculated by Statistics Korea.

The figure was higher, however, compared to the 34.8 percent who said they were middle class in the same survey by HRI in 1998 when Korea was in the midst of a financial crisis.

This shows that the current economy is in bad shape but not perceived as bad as the Asian financial crisis back then, HRI’s senior researcher Kim Dong-yeol said in a report.

Only 1.9 percent said they belonged to the high-income bracket in the recent survey, in contrast to the 20.8 percent stated by the government.

Some 98.1 percent of the respondents said it would be difficult to move up the social ladder due to a widening income gap (36.3 percent), sluggish economic sentiment (21.5 percent), lack of good jobs (12.1 percent) and too much debt (11.4 percent).

Declining income and increasing debt were picked as the main factors leading to the fall to lower classes.

As to what caused them to tumble to the low-income bracket, respondents in their 20s cited unstable jobs (33.3 percent) and loss of jobs (7.4 percent), while rising debts including loan interests (22.2 percent) was the most common answer among those in their 30s.

Among the 40-somethings, excessive spending for children’s education took up 24.4 percent. Those in their 50s cited income reduction (37.4 percent), unstable jobs (16.5 percent) and loss of jobs (7.7 percent).

As for measures to expand the middle class, stabilization of prices (23.2 percent) was chosen the most, followed by job creation (19.7 percent), stabilization of the housing market and support of housing costs (15.4 percent), stimulation of the economy (14.8 percent) and easing of private education expenses (12.1 percent).

The subjective average monthly income for a four-person middle-class household was 4.85 million won ($4,270) in the HRI survey, nearly double the 2.49 million won in the 1998 survey.

Relatively few among those in their 50s, blue-collar workers, self-employed people, farmers, fishermen and people living in the southern parts of the country thought they were middle class.

The sense of belonging to the middle class was more widespread among those in their 20s, housewives, white-collar workers and people living in large cities, the Seoul metropolitan area and the Chungcheong region.

By Kim So-hyun (sophie@heraldcorp.com)