Three in 10 Workers Self-Employed
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Approximately three out of 10 Korean workers are self-employed, according to numbers by the government Tuesday.
This roughly suggests that the country has the highest rate of self-employment among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) states, a structure economists believe increases the vulnerability of the country's economy and workforce.
At the end of 2006, the number of self-employed Koreans, including business owners, was at around 7.76 million, about 33.6 percent of the 23.15 million Koreans with jobs.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has yet to provide the 2006 numbers of self-employed by country. However, Korea's self-employment rate of 33.6 percent is higher than that of any other country featured in the ILO report for 2005, with Greece coming closest at 30.1 percent followed by Turkey with 29.8 percent.
When counting family members and others who work for individually operated businesses without wages, the self-employment population accounts for about 40 percent of Korea's hired workforce, presumably second behind Turkey's 45.8 percent.
The high self-employment rate indicates the tough reality of the Korean job market, where workers, ousted from their old workplaces, struggle to find new jobs.
``Since the financial crisis of the late 1990s, many workers who were cut from their workplaces ended up establishing personally operated businesses, like restaurants, which contributed to making the country's self-employment rate among the highest in the world,'' said Song Tae-jeong, a researcher at the LG Economic Institute.
``The self-employed are the ones most vulnerable to recessions brought by declines in consumer spending, which is what is happening now,'' he said.
According to ILO's report for 2005, the self-employment rate of the United States stood at 7.4 percent, similar to the figures of Denmark (7.8 percent) and Norway (7.1 percent).
Japan's self-employment rate stood at 10.2 percent, slightly lower than Germany, 11.2 percent, and Finland, 12 percent, while Britain and Australia were tied at 12.7 percent.
Mexico (28.3 percent), Portugal (23.5 percent) and Poland (20.5 percent) were the other countries above 20 percent in self-employment rates.