Economic Status of the Korean Elderly Women : How Secure Are They?

Abstract

This study examined the economic status of elderly women and specified risk factors for elderly women in poverty. The contributions of this study were to improve the understanding of the economic conditions of older women and to provide considerable policy implications for elderly demographic changes in the future. The data for this study were from the baseline wave of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA) and the sample consists of 2,419 elderly women. To examine the economic status of older women, poverty rates based on absolute and relative poverty thresholds were used, and income portfolios were analyzed. Multivariate analysis was used to provide an estimate of the extent to which older women correlated with poverty. The major findings were: (1) the poverty rate for elderly women was more than 40 percent in a given year; (2) older women living alone were economically vulnerable in terms of poverty rate and income distribution; (3) private transfers were the main source of income for older women living alone and for poor elderly women in general; (4) elderly women's living arrangement, current employment status, holding of income from assets, pensions, and private transfers, net-worth level, and educational attainment correlated with elderly women poverty; (5) incomes from government transfers were not sufficient to preclude poverty among older women in later stages of life. Thus, income maintenance programs for poor elderly women need to be strengthened in order to prevent older women from becoming poor. In addition, improving younger women's life chances by expanding their lifetime work is needed in order to make possible their financial security in later life.