2018, Vol.25, No.4

Korea Social Policy Review 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 2.47

pISSN : 1226-0525
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kasp

This study aims to analyse the redistributive impact of the welfare state growth in Korea after 2000s and establish whether there are people excluded from the benefits of the growth. The growth of the Korean welfare state has been achieved by universalizing welfare benefits under the social insurance-centered institutions which are the legacies of the productivist/developmental welfare regime. When it comes to redistribution impacts, the welfare state growth improved inequality among old age populations to a certain degree due to the introduction of the Basic Pension. On the other hand, welfare benefits for the working poor population has hardly been improved in spite of the growing welfare state. It can be said, therefore, that low-income working-age populations have been excluded from the growth of Korean welfare state. These groups are mostly in middle-old age, unemployed or precariously employed and half of them were female householders. The exclusion of these groups from the Korean welfare state shows that the growth of the Korean welfare state was unbalanced. To include the excluded into the Korean welfare state, it is necessary to increase non-insurance social provisions, extend the range of application of the social insurances, integrate income protection, employment service, and vocational training for the working poor, and combine universal and targeted welfare benefits.

The Korean welfare state has achieved remarkable development during the last two decades, but simultaneously we have witnessed growing prevalent social conflicts and exclusion in the society. This research argues that the source of current problems lies in the nature of the Korean welfare regime, so called, 'paternalistic liberalism'. The paternalistic liberalism has been formulated by the combination of legacies of the developmental state and neo-liberalism. Paternalism with the growth-oriented and employment-centered approach has been a significant factor to restrict individuals’ freedom and happiness in the Korean welfare state. It has also been embedded in the Korean welfare state such as social insurance, workfare programs, and centralized social services. In this context, this research proposes social liberalism, pursuing real freedom for all, as a new paradigm for the Korean welfare state. Breaking from the old path, Freecurity, combining freedom and security, which is argued to be the upgraded version of flexicurity, is also newly proposed as the operating model of social liberalism.

This paper adopts a distributive performance process model of in-work poverty based on labor markets, households, and welfare states and analyzes the 4-11 waves of the Korean Welfare Panel Study during 2008-15. Previous studies on in-work poverty have focused on the definitions and concepts of in-work poverty by analyzing employment and unemployment persistence and repetition dynamics, but rarely paid attention to institutional distributive performance. In this regard, this study preforms a stepwise analysis of labor markets, households, and welfare states as a process of income generation in labor markets, satisfaction of welfare needs and income pooling at households, and deduction of social security contribution and income tax as well as receipt of public transfer income at welfare states. Results of empirical analysis show that in-work poverty had been on increase during 2008-11, followed by a decrease between 2012-15. At labor market stages, full time status had the most prominent impact on in-work poverty process, while status by employment and contract type have generated a huge variation as well. At household stages, household work intensity and number of earners contributed to reduction of in-work poverty, but the relations did not seen to be straightforward. However, welfare state played little role in lifting employees out of in-work poverty. In terms of institutional distributive process, in-work poverty was prevalent in either household-welfare state stage or labor market-household-welfare stage. Non-vulnerable group in terms of in-risk poverty was around 80% of the sample during the period of analysis, the size of which has remained constant.