Institutional responses to poverty: Korea’s evolutionary social security System
Yong-Moon Jung
University of Sydney
Contact Email:   jungraphaelgmail.com

Ironically, the economic crisis in 1997 transformed the Korean welfare state from a residual to an institutional model. Mass unemployment and the concurrent expansion of people living in poverty was an inevitable outcome of the process of economic restructuring, thus precipitating a fundamental change in poverty policy. The most remarkable change was the introduction of the National Basic Livelihood Security System (NBLSS) in 2000. This was a turning point from the paternalism of the pre-existing Livelihood Protection Law, which had been in place for about 40 years, without major change, to the establishment of welfare as a right, consolidating the government’s responsibility for poverty. The most important new feature of the policy was that all households below the poverty line were now eligible for income support irrespective of the ability of members of the household to work. Under the old system, the provision was limited to disabled and the older people over 65years. However, this did not mean the complete abolition of the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Under the rhetoric of ‘productive welfare’, those who have ability to work have to participate in self-help community work, job training or job search to maintain the eligibility. Also, beneficiaries do not have to meet both the means and asset test with the introduction of ‘income acknowledgement’, which is a device to convert assets to income to compute a single income standard. Although the NBLSS has significant meaning as the government’s active concern about the ‘working poor’, it is the fact that poverty problem continues and along with an on-going controversy about the work-incentive policy.

As part of wider PhD research on meanings of poverty in Australia and Korea, this paper examines the implications of Korea’s recent institutional responses to poverty and how they fit into the wider cultural perceptions of poverty in Korea.

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