Determinants of Exit from National Basic Livelihood Security Program in Korea : Focused on Aging

Background/Purpose

Recent an important policy challenge is to facilitate the escape from National Basic Livelihood Security program. On the other hand, the characteristics of Korean National Basic Livelihood Security System recipients can be very different for each group because of gender, age, employment prospects and other demographic characteristics. However, previous analysis of the National Basic Livelihood Security System targeted escape factors was little focused on these various factors so far. In other words, in the cases of the many previous studies these assumed recipients homogenous group. Those are some limitations.

Furthermore, one of the most serious social problems is old people's poverty in Korea. That is, elderly poverty rate in Korea is very high level, and this phenomenon is more likely to severe with an rapid aging trend. However, studies of factors affecting the exit from National Basic Livelihood Security program did not deal with these issues much. So this study analyzes the determinants of exit from National Basic Livelihood Security program focused on age.

 Methods

Data The data used for this study is the Korea Welfare Panel 1-8 Year material. Korea Welfare Panel is a panel data representing of Korea and this data has many merits. The size of the recipient population is much larger than the others like labor panel's sample, health iInsurance panal, etc. Also it is possible to get the benefits because it contains more variables than others like the medical care data.

Sample The analysis is based on the people who have experienced at least once security system beneficiaries during the analysis periods - Korea Welfare Panel 1-8 primary data-. Among 25,819 people, people who have experienced services in the first year were chosen. 7679 people were drop out because of missing variables so 631 people, 5,048 person-years data are the sample of this research.

Method Discrete-time hazard model was used for the analysis and analyzed the general logistic regression model.

 Result

This study analyzed three groups -total population, population under 50 years and over 50 age group-. The main results are followings. First, gender and health status, status of economic activity does not have significant effect in all three groups. Second, marital status were significant in all three models(under 50 years p<.01, other two groups p<.10). Third, in the case of education, total population(p<.05) and less than 50 years(p<.01) have shown that significant and, over 50 years of age group showed non-significant.

 Conclusion and Implication

The variables that significantly affect the exit from National Basic Livelihood Security program are marital status and household's number among all three groups. In the case of education over 50 years old does not have a statistically significant impact to the escape from absolute poverty. It could be done due to the tendency to continue to maintain the status of recipients to death. And to study more exact reason, more sophisticated empirical analysis will be needed in the future.