hankyoreh

By Park Su-ji, staff reporter

Four out of ten South Koreans are not married, the highest rate among the 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries, a recent report said.

According to marriage figures included in the Society at a Glance 2014 report released by the OECD in Mar. 2014, the percentage of South Koreans over the age of 15 who had never been married was 38.6% as of 2012. The OECD average for the rate of individuals who have not married was 27.1%. Trailing South Korea in the rate of unmarried people were Chile at 38.0% and Ireland at 33.4%.

“The biggest reason for the increase in the unmarried rate is that more women are working and getting married for the first time later, which is leading to there being more unmarried people in their twenties and thirties,” said Lee Sang-rim, director of the center for population research at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA), on May 6. “We can infer that people are gradually getting married later as housing becomes more expensive and steady employment becomes harder to find.”

Currently, 55.8% of Koreans are in married, higher than the OECD average of 52.4%. The percentage of Koreans in other kinds of relationships (neither unmarried nor married) was negligible, with 3.5% bereaved, 1.3% divorced, 0.6% legally separated, and 0.2% cohabiting.

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