This file photo, provided by Seoul’s Jongno Ward office on Feb. 23, 2022, shows an official operating a hotline for single-person households.
SEOUL, April 9 (Korea Bizwire) — Nearly half of single-member households were in the poor class and the proportion among senior citizens came to nearly 70 percent, a report showed Sunday.
The relative poverty rate of one-person households came to 47.2 percent in 2020, compared with 15.3 percent for all households, according to the report by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.
The rate refers to the percentage of people with income below 50 percent of the median income.
The figure for single-person households, however, has been on a decrease from 54 percent in 2016 to 52.7 percent in 2018 and to 51.8 percent in 2019, the report showed.
Of one-person households among people aged 65 and older, 72.1 percent were classified as being in the poor bracket as of 2020, though the figure went down from 78.4 percent five years ago, the report showed.
Calls have grown for a better social security net as the number of people who live alone has grown at a fast clip in recent years.
The number of one-person households came to 7.16 million in 2021, and their proportion out of the country’s total households reached an all-time high of 33.4 percent, the data compiled by Statistics Korea showed.
Earlier, the welfare ministry said that more than 3,300 people died “lonely deaths” in 2021, which means they died alone and remained undiscovered for a long period of time, due to isolation from society, economic issues and an increase in single-person households, among other issues.
The number of lonely deaths grew at an average annual rate of 8.8 percent over the past five years, and they accounted for more than 1 percent of all deaths in 2021, according to the ministry.
(Yonhap)
