About one in four people in South Korea experienced poverty in the past three years, a government survey showed Friday.
According to the survey of 16,973 households and their members by Statistics Korea, 25.1 percent of people were found to have suffered from poverty in at least one year in the 2011-2013 period.
No comparable figures are available since this is the first survey of its kind.
Also, those who had been in poverty for three straight years during the cited period came to 9.3 percent, the report showed.
Poverty here is defined as when the so-called “equivalised” disposable income of a household member is below 50 percent of the median annual earnings.
The agency explained that the equivalised disposable income refers to total income minus common expenses, divided by the square root of the number of family members. The median annual income stood at 22.4 million won (US$2,013) in 2013. (Yonhap)
