By Kim Tong-hyung
Authorities are alarmed as the anti-Wall Street march reaches Korean shores.
But reading protesters’ banners, which carried demands stemming from a wide range of causes, the recent gatherings in Seoul seemed more like an extension of long-standing demonstrations against the Lee Myung-bak government than a fresh outburst against corporate greed.
Korea’s free-trade agreement (FTA) with the United States, the government’s handling of the secondary banking crisis, expensive college tuition and the controversial national project to ``renew’’ the four major rivers were among the concerns of the hundreds of people who took the streets in Yeouido and Jung-gu over the weekend.
Other protesters voiced their displeasure over the ``unjust’’ profit U.S. buyout firm Lone Star will likely reap in its impending sale of the Korea Exchange Bank (KEB), while some denounced the ongoing government attempts to deregulate the healthcare industry.
Considering the breadth of different issues protesters here were screaming about, their link to the ``Occupy Wall Street’’ movement, which has spread from New York’s financial district to European and Asian cities, was still clear-cut. It was obvious that the diversity in placard slogans proclaimed an underlying anger about a country that quickly seems to be degrading into one of the worst places to live among rich nations.
``We are the 99 percent of Koreans who have occupied here in Yeoui-island, where the Korean stock exchange is located. We wish to send our sincerest message of gratitude and solidarity to you, the 99 percent of Americans who has conquered the Wall Street,’’ activist groups, including the Korea Finance Consumer Federation, said in a statement that was released both in Korean and English during the protests in Yeouido Saturday.
``In Korea, there are plenty of students who are killing themselves for the bank debt from skyrocketing tuition fee, plenty of seniors whose life-time savings are gone to the air for the criminal activities of banks, plenty of workers who got laid-off for private equity funds that toy with factories for squeezing fabulous sum of profit. But the politicians and government are doing nothing.’’
The alarming lack of happiness in Korean life, which has been suggested in numerous studies from both private and state-funded researchers, has much to do with the country’s widening income gap since the Asian financial crisis of the late-1990s. And the recession triggered by the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in 2008 has clearly magnified the problems created by financial inequality and the lack of social mobility.
In a recent report, the Hyundai Research Institute (HRI) claimed that Korea’s economic ``misery index’’ for the period between January and August came in at 8.1 percent, out-pacing the 6.7 percent average for the whole of 2010. Koreans are in a worse state than they were in 2008 when the misery index came in at 7.8 percent.
The misery index is an economic indicator created by economist Arthur Okun and calculated by adding the unemployment rate to the inflation rate. The concept is based on the assumption that higher unemployment and worsening inflation put economic and social strains on a nation.
``The core of the problem is that the subduing of the global economy leads to job market instability … Koreans have also had to endure high levels of inflation this year,’’ said Ju Won, an economist at HRI.
``There is still room for things to get worse. There is a possibility that the eurozone debt crisis could worsen, which would hurt the value of risk-sensitive local currency, hurt growth and further deteriorate the job market.’’
Average Koreans continue to see their living standards deteriorate as wages fail to keep up with the rising cost of living. Workers’ share of national income was safely above 60 percent in the early-to-mid 1990s, but fell to 58 percent in 2000 and 59.2 percent in 2010, according to government figures, as the country’s economic policies continue to put exports before consumption.
Inflation-adjusted wages have been declining in past years and the fall could be steeper this year, considering consumer price inflation has been above target for nine straight months and counting.
The country’s historically-high household debt, at near one quadrillion won, matches an entire year’s gross domestic product (GDP), while an alarmingly large portion of working-age Koreans remain sidelined from the labor market.
The Korea Development Institute’s (KDI) recent quality-of-life survey placed Korea 27th among the 39 industrialized nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Group of 20, based on data for 2008. The country only managed middle rankings in the three other categories analyzed ― economic growth potential, infrastructure and environment.