OECD reports that moving to Seoul no longer guarantees upward mobility for young Koreans

While ambitious young Koreans continue to be drawn to the greater Seoul area, a new Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) analysis suggests that the move increasingly fails to translate into the upward mobility that it once promised.

“Competition for a spot in top-tier universities and a shortage of quality jobs still push young people toward [Seoul], but new research suggests that [this migration] is no longer the path to prosperity that it once was,” the OECD wrote in a report published by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training on Monday. 

From 1998 to 2023, the OECD and the Bank of Korea tracked 1,000 Koreans born between 1971 and 1990, as well as their parents. The analysis found that young people who moved from provinces to the greater Seoul region had higher incomes than those who did not relocate.

The OECD, however, said that this move’s effect on social mobility is weakening. Even though their income is comparatively higher than that of others their age, young people who move closer to the capital still find it difficult to end up better off than their parents.

The impact was especially weak among the study’s youngest cohort, or those born between 1981 and 1990.

The report also found that parental income plays a decisive role in whether young people from the provinces relocate. As children of lower-income parents have less or no familial help with covering the greater Seoul area’s high housing and living costs, they struggle more than their financially comfortable peers to make the move, which in turn limits their access to universities and jobs in Seoul. 

Even when children from low-income families successfully relocate to Seoul, they face difficulties sustaining a life there without parental support, further narrowing their chances of moving up the economic ladder.

The OECD particularly identified the capital region’s high housing costs as a barrier for young people from outside the metropolitan area. The share of homes in Seoul that households earning the national median income find affordable plunged from 32 percent in 2012 to 7 percent last year, according to the OECD.

The organization also warned that the economic concentration in the greater Seoul area raises the risk of population decline, labor shortages and economic contraction in the rest of the country.

To counter this, the OECD called for policies that expand opportunities outside the capital region, including improving job and education conditions and expanding transportation and digital infrastructure.

BY JUNG SI-NAE [[email protected]]