한은 "국내 청년실업 증가, 고령화•양질 일자리 부족 영향"
The nation's youth unemployment climbed sharply in recent years.
To try and dissect the problem, the Bank of Korea released a research that compares similarities and differences between Seoul and Tokyo's youth jobless rate...and suggests ways to address the issue.
Kim Hyesung provides a closer look.
Some of the factors pushing up youth unemployment in Korea... are the country's rapidly aging population and the huge wage gap between big conglomerates and smaller companies.
Using data from 30 OECD countries between 2000 and 2017, the Bank of Korea's report looks into youth unemployment across countries and in particular, the similarities and differences between Korea and Japan.
In 2000, the two countries had a similar youth jobless rate of around six percent, but as of 2017, South Korea's youth unemployment rate had soared to nearly ten percent,... while Japan's had fallen to four percent.
The BOK said youth unemployment went up in both countries as their economies slowed down and their populations got older, factors that reduce market demand and therefore labor demand.
Since 2011, Korea' GDP growth has tumbled to below 4 percent,... far lower than the nine percent growth seen in 2000.
One difference in particular between Korea and Japan since that time... has been their labor structures and the wage gap between large conglomerates and SMEs.
The BOK said Korea's small and mid-sized companies pay workers a little over half the amount the conglomerates do, with the gap still widening.
That means young people spend more time boosting their qualifications so they can work at the country's biggest firms,... which results in a job-skill mismatch and higher youth unemployment.
On the other hand, wages at Japanese SMEs were more than 80 percent of the amount paid by large companies.
In addition, it said the vocational training programs introduced by Japan starting in the early 2000s helped lower the job-skill mismatch and created jobs of higher quality.
To tackle Korea's record high youth unemployment, the BOK recommended lowering the growing wage gap between big and small companies and introducing work training programs.
Kim Hyesung, Arirang News.
