Subjective Quality of Korean Life in 1981 and 2001

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Korea has been transformed into an economic powerhouse, a maturing democracy, a nation of cities, and a society of mixed cultures. How have these changes affected the quality of life that ordinary Koreans experience in the private and public spheres of their lives? In their eyes, what specific domains of Korean life have changed for the better? What life domains have changed for the worse? This paper explores these questions with two sets of national sample surveys conducted, respectively, in 1981 and 2001. Analyses of these surveys reveal that the Korean people, as a whole, tend to feel that they are worse off than they were 20 years ago. Over this same period, they felt that the domains of health, education, work, and community have changed for the better, while the three domains of leisure, the government, and the country have changed for the worse. Notwithstanding all the significant improvements in the standards of their living, Koreans do not express a significantly greater sense of well-being about the domains of income and housing. Most surprising is that they feel worse about the freely elected democratic government, than they did about the repressive military regime of 20 years ago. Why has the perceived quality of the Korean government deteriorated rather than improved in the wake of democratic regime change? This remains unanswered.