Is Korea’s Social Services Employment Increasing Too Fast?

Employment in social services is on an increasing trend in the developed world. The average among the OECD countries, for instance, was about 43 employments per thousand population, or about 9.1 per cent of total employments, in 2005. In 2020, it has risen as high as 49 employments per thousand population and 10.4 per cent of total employment. In 2016, right before the previous Korean administration was inaugurated in 2017, Korea had 36.3 employments in social services per thousand population, far below the OECD average. Since then, social services employment grew the fastest in Korea among the OECD countries, narrowing its gap from the OECD average. By 2019, for instance, social services em-ployments per thousand population in-creased by 6.3, while the average among the OECD countries was 2.7. Is Korea’s fast increase “natural” or justifiable? As an attempt to shed some light on this issue, KIEP researchers estimated the determinants of the size of social services employment and used the results to compare the observed (i.e., actual) change with the predicted change (Joe et al. 2021 and Joe 2022). This exercise supports Korea’s speed of increase; that is, it was no faster than what is predicted by the estimated models. This Brief summarizes these exercises.