한국의 低福祉 현상

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The Korean economy in the last half century can be characterized by growth-only policy ignoring income distribution and social welfare. However, further economic growth has become very hard since 1997 because of the
tendency toward polarization of the economy and the difficulty of creating jobs. Still many people in Korea believe in growth-only policy and they tend to think pursuing welfare dampens economic growth. They prefer small government. This paper tries to show this is not true. Korean welfare state, if anything is such a poor and ineffective one that it has much less redistributive effect than that of other welfare states. For case studies this paper examines the minimum wage, public pension, and public assistance in Korea. The sizes of subsidy to the needy of these policies are so small and there are many holes in the social safety nets. Previous studies have found the roots of poor welfare state in Korea in the Confucian tradition and the right wing politics. But we may add the elements of political dictatorship which hardly neeeded the support from the mass, and the possibilities of corruption in economic budget as compared to welfare budget. These factors seem to have made Korea a peculiarly poor and ineffective welfare state. As growth-only is no longer viable, an alternative route of development strategy taking into full account of welfare and distribution seems to be almost imperative at the current stage of Korean capitalism.