Child Support Compliance in South Korea: Understanding the Factors in a New Country Context

Background and Purpose: This study empirically examines the factors associated with child support compliance among divorced single mothers in South Korea. Although Korea implemented new laws requiring establishing child support orders for divorcing couples in the late 2000s and created a national agency to provide assistance in enforcing the orders, little is known about whether child support is paid as ordered (i.e., compliance). Guided by the theory and the literature developed for the mostly Western, industrialized countries, we examine the pattern of child support compliance in Korea and the factors associated with child support compliance.

Methods: We use data from the Korean Survey of Single Parents (KSSP) of 2018. KSSP includes rich cross-sectional data from a nationally representative sample of Korean single parents, and it is the only dataset available that provides information on child support orders and compliance. We focus on divorced custodial mothers because unmarried single parents are rare in Korea and child support receipt may be significantly different between custodial mothers and fathers. Child support compliance is defined by a ratio of the amount of child support received by the custodial mothers to the amount of child support ordered in the previous year. We first examine the pattern of child support compliance. Then we employ a series of multinomial and Tobit regression models to examine the factors associated with child support compliance. We also utilize relative importance analysis to analyze whether certain factors explain more of the variance of child support compliance than others.

Results: Among the 1,232 divorced custodial mothers in the data, about 34 percent reported they had a legal child support order. Among those with the legal child support order, 63% reported they received the full amount of child support ordered in the past year and 28% reported a zero amount. The relatively high rate of full compliance is somewhat surprising given that the formal child support system was created in Korea only recently. In terms of the factors associated with child support compliance, the results suggest that relationship variables (e.g., recency of the divorce, mother-father contact) are strong predictors of the child support compliance by noncustodial fathers. Also, mothers with health problems or not receiving government assistances are more likely to receive child support, which suggest that noncustodial fathers respond to the economic needs of the custodial parents. Interestingly, noncustodial father’s education and employment are associated with the existence of child support order but child support compliance.

Conclusions and Implications: The findings from the study show that while many custodial mothers do not have a legal child support order even after the recent child support reforms in Korea, the majority of those with child support orders do receive the full amount. The results also suggest that cultural and policy contexts matter in understanding child support receipt among single-mother families, thus different strategies may be required to increase child support compliance in different countries.