hankyoreh

By Choi Hyun-june, staff reporter

On Independence Day three years ago, President Lee Myung-bak said, “I will create a new livelihood index for ordinary people based on five areas: income, employment, education, housing and safety”.

It is now clear that those were empty promises and they weren’t the only claims made by Lee. “I will take care of our people’s happiness by developing an index that will measure their quality of life,” he declared on October 27, 2009 at the OECD World Forum in Busan. The president referred to the “People’s Happiness Index” and the “People’s Livelihood Index.”

The Prime Minister’s Office established a team to oversee work towards these ideals following the president’s pledge in August 2009. The team pursued the development of a new index in the areas that the president talked about, but after making little to no progress, it dissolved at the end of 2010.

There was no end result and nothing reported in between. A Blue House official said, “The responsibilities for making indexes is divided up among the different ministries. We tried to have the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) oversee the entire project but nothing came out of it.” An officer at the PMO confided that indeed, there was no outcome and the project had to be aborted.

As a follow up to the president’s declaration, the government at the time announced the “People’s Livelihood Index”, five major indicators that would measure not just statistics, but quality of life. There were to be the GINI coefficient (which measures inequality), the employment rate, spending on private education, housing cost as per income, and occurrence of violent crime as a measure of safety).

There has also be no visible progress towards the “People’s Happiness Index”. The scheme is being pursued as a long-term project and thus it will be hard to see any outcome within the next 3 to 4 years. A government officer involved in the project said, “Quality of living is such a subjective matter that it is very difficult to measure. The president may have been a bit hasty in declaring such a project.”

In order to measure the quality of life, a number of pointers must be present which are able to subjectively measure levels of satisfaction. However, the domestic situation will make it difficult to assess subjective indexes, especially since various economic and social indicators close to the livelihood of the people are so low, observers inside and outside the government said.

The Hankyoreh conducted its own survey on the five indexes related to the lives of ordinary people, similar to what the president put forward. The results seemed to show that the lives of the people have not improved much. The employment rate dropped from 59.8% in 2007 to 59.1% in 2011. House prices jumped: in 2007 prospective buyers saved for an average of five years to buy a house, but in 2011 it took 5.88 years.

The number of violent crimes per 100 thousand people rose from 33 in 2007 to 53 in 2011. The only indicator that improved was the GINI coefficient, which in 2007 was 0.312 and improved to 0.311 in 2011 (a lower number signifies a more equal distribution of income).

Yonsei University professor of sociology Han Joon, who has worked with Korea Statistics, to measure the quality of life said that putting together such an index is a good means for the government to communicate and interact with people. However, because it is an area that is both comprehensive and abstract, “it must be prepared thoroughly and carried out efficiently with plenty of time.”

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