Until 1997, the unemployment rate of Korea has maintained as low as 2-3%. In the cases of other OECD countries, the levels of the unemployment rate appear to be 4-5 % in USA, 3-4 % in Japan, and 8-9 % in Germany. Nonetheless, after the IMF crisis, the unemployment rate jumped up even to 8.6 % in February of 1999. Recently, the economic recovery has been speeded up. By the influence of this economic trend, the new employments recruited by companies have continuously increased, and the real business indicators such as investigation, consuming, and so on shows a clear recovery of the economy. As a result of rapid recovery of our economy, the unemployment rate decreased sharply from 6.8% in 1998 and 6.3% in 1999 to 4.1% in 2000. This figure is much higher than 2.6% in 1997 when IMF crisis broke out, but is still low compared with those of developed countries.
The lower unemployment rate provides of course a feel good fact than the higher rate does. However, the complete employment level in a nation doesn't indicate 0 % of unemployment rate. The reason is that regardless of good or bad economic trends, temporary unemployment occurs any time in such cases when individuals move to other work places, and when machines replace human work-forces due to technological developments. Furthermore, when the farmer's slack season is taking places, such seasonal reasons as temporary unemployment and others occur also. For this kind of situation, some of experts express these opinions that around 4 % of unemployment rate is the complete unemployment level from the view of Korean economic situation.
|
