Trend and Decomposition of Asset Poverty in Korea

Abstract

Over the past ten years, Korea has experienced a surge in asset values and has become to face the problem of asset equity. However, people's concern surrounding asset has been concentrated on those with large amounts of asset. There has been less concern on those with little or no asset and on the trend of asset poverty. Using the 2nd to 11th waves of the Korea Labor and Income Panel Data, this study explored the trend of assetpoverty in Korea from 1999 to 2008 and also tried to decompose the change of poverty into the parts due to growth and distribution, using Dart and Ravallion(1992)'s method. The results showed that the asset poverty has continued to increase while the average amount of households' assets has gradually increased in Korea for the last ten years. The decomposition results on the change of poverty rate between 1999 and 2008 showed that the growth factor contributed to the decrease of asset poverty while the distribution factor contributed to the increase of asset poverty. Overall the distribution factor dominated the growth factor so that the asset poverty rate has increased during the ten years.