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The International Monetary Fund has slammed Korea for failing to generate more permanent jobs. A report titled ¡°Asia and Pacific Regional Economic Outlook¡± published Thursday in effect suggests that the Korean economy¡¯s driving force has stopped working amid the country posting growth below its potential growth for several years.
The Korean economy has ¡°a staggering 37 percent of salaried employees now under fixed-term contracts -- 10 percentage points higher than four years ago and two-and-a-half times the OECD average,¡± the IMF says. ¡°If Korea is faring worse than other advanced countries, it is partly because job precariousness is greater.¡± The report says the economy ¡°has proven unable to generate permanent salaried employment.¡± It stresses that some 30 percent of all new jobs created in the service sector in the past decade were self-employed. Most of them did not choose to be self-employed but were forced into it because they could not find permanent jobs.
The self-employed accounted for 34 percent of the total workforce in Korea as of 2004, which placed the nation fourth after Turkey, Greece and Mexico among OECD member nations and at more than twice the OECD average of 17 percent. ¡°Korea¡¯s president called for a sincere discussion on the widening income gap in his New Year¡¯s message,¡± the report recalls. ¡°The increased precariousness of work exacerbates other social inequalities.¡± According to its analysis, the non-regular jobs the Korean economy produces are highly unstable and workers ¡°face substantially higher probability of a return to unemployment.¡± The IMF also says its analysis of how much the wealth gap in major countries in the Asia Pacific region widened over the last decade shows that Korea did worst in this regard. The IMF measures the gap between high and low incomes by the ratio of the mean of the ninth to the second decile.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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