Child Support Receipt in South Korea and the United States

Background and Purpose: Due to the increasing number of single-mother families and concern about economic vulnerability among these families, many countries have sought to improve child support receipt among single mothers. A significant body of research has examined the correlates of child support receipt within a given country. Fewer studies have employed a cross-national comparative perspective to understand how cultural and policy contexts influence: (a) levels of child support receipt and (b) the effects of child support enforcement systems and individual-level characteristics on the receipt. Further, little research has been conducted on how policy and cultural contexts affect child support receipt in East Asian countries. The current study addresses this gap by comparing the levels and correlates of child support receipt in the United States and South Korea, one of the first East-Asian countries that established a pubic child support agency.

Methods: To examine whether the levels and correlates of child support receipt differ in Korea and the U.S., we utilized a sample of approximately 6,500 custodial single-mother families from: (a) the 2012 and 2015 Korean Survey of Single-Parents, and (b) the 2012 and 2014 U.S. Current Population Survey—Child Support Supplement, two national-level data sources representative of single-mother families in Korea and the U.S., respectively. Both data sets include demographic and socioeconomic status information about custodial mothers, as well as information about their welfare and child support receipt. We employed tobit models as a main analytic strategy, testing the robustness of the results to different models.

Results: First, we found that country of residence matters: living in the U.S. versus Korea is associated with higher child support receipt, perhaps due to differences in cultural expectations and the strength of child support enforcement between the two countries. Second, in Korea, the positive relationship between mother’s economic needs and child support receipt, and the negative relationship between welfare participation and child support receipt are notable, while both of these associations are relatively weak or statistically insignificant in the U.S. This difference may be due the different interactions between the child support system and the welfare system in two countries. In Korea, no child support received is disregarded in the determination of welfare eligibility and benefit levels, while all child support paid is passed through to the families. In contrast, in most U.S. states, not all child support received on behalf of welfare recipients is passed through to the families. However, in the U.S., but not in Korea, child support enforcement service is a requirement for receiving welfare.

Conclusions and Implications: The results suggest that culture and policy environments have a determining influence on child support receipt among single-mother families, not only directly, but also by affecting the ways in which mothers’ characteristics and welfare policy shape the receipt. From the U.S. perspective, Korea’s experience can be seen as an experiment to assess the effects of a non-pass-through child support policy with no requirement for child support enforcement service among welfare recipients.