By Choi Sung-jin
Korea has one of the strangest labor markets in the world, according to an OECD report released last week, largely because the country has a handful of statistical anomalies caused by demographic changes and record-keeping methodologies.
For instance, the wage gap between men and women and the income disparity between top and bottom wage earners in this country are among the widest within the OECD. Korea’s jobless rate is among the lowest in the world but its employment rate is below the OECD average. The hiring rate for the elderly is above the average but the share of NEET (not in employment, education or training) is also above average.
The OECD report, titled “Building more resilient and inclusive labor markets,” was distributed to member nations at a conference of labor ministers on Friday, the first such meeting in seven years.
As of 2013, the report shows, Korean women’s wages were 36.6 percent less than men’s, the widest gap among 34 countries surveyed and more than twice the OECD average of 15.3 percent. Wages of the top 10 percent of Korean workers were also 4.8 times higher than the bottom 10 percent, the fourth-widest gap following the United States, Turkey and Israel.
Korea is a strange country where the number of unemployed is relatively small but that of the employed is also small. As of the third quarter of last year, Korea’s jobless rate was 3.6 percent, the second lowest, along with India, among the 49 countries surveyed. The rate of people remaining unemployed for one year or longer was the lowest with 0.5 percent, compared with Greece’s 73.7 percent and Japan’s 36.4 percent. But its employment rate _ the number of workers between 15 and 64 years of age _ was 65.8 percent, lower than the average 66.2 percent.
The disparity between unemployment and employment rates was attributable to the government’s system of calculation, which excludes a considerable number of job seekers as “not economically active population.” Korea does not categorize jobless people as such “unless they seek jobs actively.”
The employment gap was also wide across age groups. For people between 55 and 64 years of age, the employment rate was 65.9 percent as of the third quarter of 2015, way above the OECD’s average of 58.2 percent.
However, that of women in the 25 to 54 age group remained at 63.4 percent, well below the average of 77.4 percent. Particularly, the share of the so-called NEET, aged from 15 to 29, was 18.0 percent, compared with the OECD average of 16.5 percent, indicating there are more lethargic youngsters here than in other industrial countries, the report showed.