Upward social mobility is becoming an ever more distant dream
for the poorer classes in Korea. The Korea Institute for Health
and Social Affairs last week released an in-depth analysis of
income data and found that the proportion of households who make
their way out of poverty is dwindling. The institute tracked the
income of 5,637 households nationwide from 2005 to 2009. Based
on disposable income, the proportion of people who made it out
of poverty shrank from 35.4 percent in 2005-6 to 31.3 percent in
2008-9. Nam Sang-ho at the institute said the finding means that
poverty "is increasingly self-perpetuating." The institute
followed the OECD index by including households with less than
50 percent of the median income of the total population.