20년간의 세대 간 사회이동의 변화: 30~49세 두 남성 코호트 비교 분석

초록

Widely spreading out in contemporary Korea is a public perception that intergenerational social mobility is declining. However, recent scholarly works report that intergenerational social mobility has not decreased but rather has increased. Using individual data from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) collected in two different years over the period of 20 years, we assess how intergenerational social mobility has changed during the last two decades between 30-to-49-year-old men in 1998 (i.e., those born between 1949 and 1968) and their counterparts of the same age range in 2018 (i.e., those born between 1969 and 1988). By comparing two groups of men born 20 years apart but measuring their social classes for the same age range, our study overcomes the main limitations of previous studies of intergenerational social mobility. The major findings can be summarized as follows. First, the absolute social mobility rates in Korea are still comparably high. Although upward mobility rates have declined somewhat during the last two decades, the trend is primarily due to rapid decline in the share of sons who originated from the farmer class. Second, relative social mobility has increased between 1998 and 2018. Third, the core social fluidity model applied to social mobility tables in both years shows that inheritance of service class and routine non-manual class, two classes often classified as a white-collar class, has decreased between two birth cohorts, probably contributing to the overall increase in relative social mobility. Our finding is consistent with recent studies showing that intergenerational social mobility in Korea has not declined. To better understand the discrepancy between the public perception and scholarly works on trends in social mobility, more research is needed, especially with more sophisticated class classification and additional analyses on the intergenerational income mobility and the more recent cohorts born in the 1990s.

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