In the ‘2024 Income Mobility Statistics’ released by the National Data Office on the 29th, the share of people who changed income bracket was 33.0%, down for a fourth straight year to a record low. The Kyunghyang Shinmun said the 16.9% moving up is also the lowest since the statistics began.
According to the Kyunghyang Shinmun, the National Data Office released the ‘2024 Income Mobility Statistics’ on the 29th. Income mobility, the share of people whose income bracket differed from the previous year, was 33.0%, down 1.2 percentage points and falling for a fourth straight year to a record low. The share moving up a bracket was 16.9%, the lowest since the data series began in 2017.
광고 문의 · 300×250The share moving down was also the lowest, at 16.1%, so movement fell in both directions. The share staying at the two ends actually rose. Those remaining in the first quintile (bottom 20%) came to 70.7% and those remaining in the fifth (top 20%) to 86.5%, each up 0.6 percentage points.
Strata set over eight years
The long-term trend is clearer still. Of those in the bottom quintile in 2017, 24.9% stayed in the same bracket for eight straight years, and of those in the top quintile in 2017, 56.0% remained there throughout. The numbers show a structure in which it is hard to leave the bottom and the top stays put.
Mobility among the young (ages 15 to 39) was 39.3%, down 1.1 points. That is still above the middle-aged (40 to 64) at 30.4% and the elderly (65 and over) at 24.4%, but it fell below 40% for the first time since the statistics began. Upward mobility among the young was 22.4%, down 0.6 points, and the share of first-quintile young people who left that bracket fell 0.7 points, from 38.4% to 37.7%.
The share of young people staying in the first quintile rose 0.7 points to 62.3%, and in the fifth quintile 0.9 points to 84.8%, a larger rise than for the middle-aged (0.5 points) or the elderly (0.8 points). Choi Ba-ul, head of the policy statistics research office at the National Data Office, said young people who land stable, well-paid jobs tend to stay in the upper brackets and those who do not remain in the lower ones. He read the higher stay rates at both ends as a sign that fewer young people got the chance to move to better jobs.
He pointed out that in 2024 growth in employee compensation paid to workers lagged economic growth while business operating surplus grew faster, citing a larger share of growth going to companies. The Kyunghyang Shinmun read this as pressure on the young that has built up since COVID-19: workers’ total income grew, but not as fast as the economy, making it harder for young people to share in growth.