Poverty and Inequality Among the Elderly South Koreans

This study examines how the financial crisis in South Korea in 1997 marked an abrupt end of the state-led developmental state, and following neoliberal reforms accelerated income inequality and poverty among the elderly Koreans. The data used in this study comes from Statistics Korea and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The result reveals that the acuteness of income inequality among the elderly arises from the pension system which is not still firmly established.Four out of ten elderly workers earn below the minimum wage or else face acute poverty. Korea‟s Gini Coefficient of the elderly aged over 65 stood at 0.422 for disposable income in 2013.A factor that contributes to elderly poverty over the past few years has been low pension replacement rate nearly 46 percent which was also far below than the OECD average of 65 percent. Another major factor that attributes to elderly poverty is their low employment rate. Almost half of the elderly are living in poverty. The povertyis also the leading cause of the suicide rate among the elderly. This study emphasises that accumulative adversities during the life course of the elderly combined with the limited welfare system threw them in poverty.