Underground economy accounted for 28% of GDP in 2005

According to a report, in 2005, Korea’s underground economy accounted for 27.6% of its GDP, the fourth-highest percentage in the OECD. So what is an underground economy?

[Friedrich] Schneider [a professor of economics at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria] defined the underground economy as all economic activities not covered by official economic statistics. It includes not only illegal activities such as drug dealing, unauthorized shops, black market trading, and tax evasion, but also bartering and exchange of labor.

And why is this bad?

“The underground economy promotes tax evasion and is therefore a deficit-causing factor,” the National Assembly Budget Office wrote. “It also disrupts even and efficient distribution of resources in the formal economy. We should prevent the illegal transaction of funds by using financial information of taxpayers and increasing the efficacy of the system that requires the reporting of transactions of large sums of cash, which will hinder attempts at tax evasion, crime, and drug dealing.”

Weddings cost about 55 million won

Are you thinking about getting married in Korea? Then, you might kiss your savings goodbye, because apparently, weddings cost about 55 million won.
Compare that to the fact that, in Korea, six million won is considered to be a “huge” student debt.

Korean on-line tutors can earn millions (of dollars, not won)

This video from Reuters describes how some on-line tutors can earn “at least four million dollars a year.” Note that these are all Koreans. No foreigners, as far as I know, earn anywhere near that kind of money.

(Hat Tip to flakfizer)

Edit/Update:

Brian in Jeollanam-do has more.

Korea has largest gender-related wage gap in the OECD

Both the Korea Times and Chosun Ilbo have articles about how Korea has the largest gender-related wage gap in the 30-member OECD.
Korea also had the lowest birthrate in the OECD but, on a positive note, also had the lowest number of teenage pregnancies.

The Chosun Ilbo had links to two related articles, one about Korean women’s status relative to those of other OECD countries, and another about the unfriendly working conditions faced by Korean employees.

Korean food prices second-highest in OECD

Korea has the second-highest food prices in the 30-member OECD. One reason is undoubtedly the fact that Korea pays four times the global average for rice. However, about half of Korea’s remaining farmers (400,000) engage in rice farming, so importing cheaper rice would certainly hurt them. Then again, in the 1960s, 70% of Koreans were farmers. Obviously, Korea is wealthier now than then.

Only 23% of immigrant women married their Korean husbands for love

A Chosun Ilbo article describes how 65.2% of 4,060 immigrant women in Incheon married their Korean husbands after only one or two meetings.

Asked why they married Korean men, 23.6 percent said they wanted a new life away from their homeland. A similar number of respondents, or 23.3 percent, said they married their husbands because they loved them. Some 18.7 percent said they wanted to live in Korea due to its economic strength, while 17 percent said they wanted to support their families at home.

So only 23.3% of them married for love, and all of the others cited economic reasons. Here is a rough breakdown of the ethnic makeup of these women.

There are 7,074 foreign women married to Koreans in Incheon, 39.7 percent of whom are Korean Chinese, 34 percent Chinese, 9.8 percent Vietnamese, 4.5 percent Philippine, 2.1 percent Japanese, and 2 percent Thai.

So about 40% of these “foreign” women are ethnically Korean, and so they’re actually not so “foreign” after all.

By the way, I saw the Korean movie “Thirst” and was pleased to see that one of the major characters, and a sympathetic one at that, was a Filipina.

Hire a Filipina housekeeper, get an English tutor for free

The Korea Times brings us the story of Kim Ji-ae, a working mother who killed two birds with one stone when she hired a Filipina housekeeper/nanny. Ms. Kim’s eight-year-old son has learned English from the Filipina.

“She speaks a little Korean, but I specifically asked her to speak in English to my son,” said the mom, who is starting to get worried that he would experience linguistic confusion from getting exposed to too much English before learning Korean fully.

Despite some concerns that may rise, education-frenzied mothers like Kim are becoming increasingly open to hiring foreign helpers to get the best of both worlds.

“The demand is enormous,” said Kim Seok, who runs an Internet site (www.nannyjob.co.kr) that helps connect parents and jobseekers. He explained that Filipinos are most favored because of their English fluency, but Chinese caregivers are also growing popular with moms wanting to teach their kids Chinese at an early age.

Korea’s global competitiveness rises from 31st to 27th

According to the Korea Herald, Korea’s global competitiveness was 27th from amongst 57 countries surveyed. This is a rise of four places, from 31st last year.
The report is based upon four factors: economic achievements, infrastructure, and government and corporate efficiency. Korea improved in all four.
However, Korea was one of the lowest-ranking Asia Pacific countries surveyed, 10th out of 13.

Korean economy may fall to 16th place this year

In an earlier post, I wrote about how the Korean economy has fallen to 14th place. Now, according to statistics compiled by the Bank of Korea, the economy is expected to fall further down the rankings, to 16th, place, as Australia and the Netherlands overtake it.

As commenter Angus astutely pointed out after my earlier post, these rankings don’t really indicate the people’s quality of life or happiness. Maybe Koreans should be more concerned about the facts that Korean kids are the unhappiest in the OECD or that many, many of them are dying from traffic accidents and suicide.

However, I remember the days when Koreans would always say, “We must become a developed country, we must become a developed country …” like a mantra. Now that they are, officially, an advanced, developed country, they have new obsessions: becoming a hub of everything, improving their “nation brand,” etc.

China, India, Russia, Brazil knock Korea down to 14th largest economy

South Korea is the world’s 14th-largest economy. What I noticed when I looked at the chart was how China (#4), India (#12), Russia (#11), and Brazil (#10) have all surpassed Korea.