This Dec. 1, 2023, file photo shows people attending a job fair organized by the unification ministry for North Korean defectors at COEX in southern Seoul. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
SEOUL, Dec. 27 (Korea Bizwire) — The employment rate of North Korean defectors in South Korea reached a new high of 60.5 percent earlier this year, a report showed Wednesday, in a sign of improving living conditions for those who fled from the North.
The April figure — which serves as annual statistics for North Korean defectors — marked a 1.3 percentage point increase from the same period of last year and the highest rate since 2011, when the Korea Hana Foundation, affiliated with the unification ministry in charge of inter-Korean affairs, began compiling relevant data.
The figure mostly hovered below the 60 percent mark before peaking at 60.4 percent in 2018. In 2011, the employment rate came to 49.7 percent.
Other figures also indicated an overall improvement in economic circumstances of North Korean defectors.
Their jobless rate fell 1.6 percentage points on-year to a record low of 4.5 percent in April while the monthly average wage rose 73,000 won (US$56.3) to 2.46 million won in the same month, according to the report.
The report was based on a survey of 2,500 North Korean defectors aged 15 and older who arrived in South Korea between January 1997 and December 2022.
To put that into perspective, South Korea’s jobless rate fell 0.2 percentage point on-year to 2.8 percent in April. South Korea’s employment rate for people aged 15 and older reached 62.7 percent in April, up 0.6 percentage point from the same period of last year.
In a separate survey conducted in May and June, a record 79.3 percent of the 2,500 North Korean defectors said they were satisfied with their new lives in South Korea.
Among those who said they were happy, 41 percent attributed this to being able to live a free life, while 28.3 percent of those who were not satisfied picked being separated from their families.
The report showed that a majority of the respondents had optimistic outlooks for their lives in South Korea.
Some 59.8 percent said they were satisfied in terms of socioeconomic achievements, compared with South Korea’s average of 31.8 percent. Some 71.3 percent of the North Korean defectors said there is a possibility of improving their socioeconomic positions, compared with 26.4 percent of average South Koreans.
“Overall figures appear to have stabilized as the number of fresh arrivals in South Korea has dropped and most of the respondents have lived in South Korea for some time now,” an official at the organization said.
“This trend is likely to continue but figures may turn out differently when the number of incoming defectors again soars to the 2,000-3,000 level,” the official said.
South Korea has a longstanding policy of accepting any North Korean defectors who want to live in the South and repatriating any North Koreans who stray into the South if they want to return.
South Korea is now home to more than 34,000 North Korean defectors, and the flow of defectors continues amid chronic food shortages and harsh political oppression in North Korea.
The number of North Koreans who arrived in South Korea hit a record low of 63 in 2021 as North Korea kept its borders closed to fend off the COVID-19 pandemic. This marks a dramatic decline from a record high of 2,914 in 2009, according to the ministry.
(Yonhap)
