What Are the Effects of Korean Child Support Reform?

Background and Purpose: As an increasing number of children are living with one biological parent, establishing and enforcing child support payments from noncustodial parents has become an important policy issue around the world. While many Western, developed countries have a relatively long history of child support policy, it was not until the late 2000s that South Korea introduced laws requiring and enforcing child support agreements in divorce cases. Since then, Korea has been undergoing a critical period of developing policies to increase child support payments. However, little empirical research has been conducted to examine the effects of the new policy, and thus there is limited evidence to inform the next steps. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the effects of the recent policy change legalizing child support agreements on the levels and correlates of child support receipt among divorced single mothers in Korea.

Methods: We take different strategies to compare single mothers divorced before and after the policy reform in their child support receipt. We first use the data from the Korean Survey of Single Parents (KSSP) of 2015 to compare child support receipt of single mothers divorced before December 2007 to those after August 2009 (excluding the cases in between, when the laws were passed to require and enforce child support agreements). KSSP includes rich cross-sectional data from a nationally representative sample of Korean single mothers. We employ standard logistic regression models and the Regression Discontinuity approach to parse out the effects of the policy change from the effects of time since the divorce. We then add KSSP of 2012, which collected similar information in 2012, to the data to identify two groups of single mothers divorced about the same time ago, with one group being divorced before the policy reform and the other being divorced after it. We compare child support receipt of the two groups and also analyze whether the factors associated with child support receipt differ between the groups.

Results: We find that the child support receipt rate among single mothers divorced after the policy reform is about 25%, which is about two times higher than those divorced before (12%). The difference is statistical signficant, even after controlling for the socioeconomic characteristics and the time since the divorce. We also find that different factors are associated with child support receipt between the pre-policy and the post-policy group; in general, the factors representing father’s willingness to pay (e.g., mother’s employment status, child’s age) matter less after the policy reform legalizing and enforcing child support agreement.

Conclusions and Implications: Overall, the findings suggest that the recent Korean child support reform has produced positive effects on child support receipt among divorced single mothers. Given that the child support receipt rate among all custodial mothers is a little over 30% in the U.S. (Grall, 2018), the observed policy effects in Korea seem to be promising. Another implication of the study is that cultural and policy contexts matter in understanding child support receipt among single-mother families.