Impact of Increasing Part-Time Work on Income Inequality

Abstract

In recent years, the Korean government has proposed increasing the number of part-time jobs and Korea’s labor market has increasingly favored part-time jobs as a solution to excessive working hours and the low labor force participation rate of women. Despite worries that such a policy would only serve to increase low-quality jobs, the Korean government hopes that its flextime job promotion policy will encourage increasing debates on the quality of part-time jobs and help solve some of the chronic problems of the Korean labor market as well. While it is certainly important to evaluate the Korean government’s policy on part-time work in light of how well it satisfies the established goals, we should not neglect how the policy affects the economic and employment status of men, who are largely the heads of their households, as well as the distribution of household income by changing the number of employed members in each household. This study provides a comparative analysis of Korea and Germany in terms of how the policy affects the labor market and income distribution.