A Comparative Study of Discouraged Unemployment in the Southeast Region and Seoul Metropolitan Area : Focusing on the Young and Female

This paper empirically examines the issues of discouraged unemployment at the regional labor market, the Southeast Region and Seoul Metropolitan Area, in Korea. Defining ‘the discouraged labor forces’ as those who hope for a job but have given up on job search activities, the paper compares the effects of the individual factors and regional factors on the discouraged unemployment. The results of the empirical analysis, focusing on the youth and women, are as follows. First, there are more discouraged labor forces than the officially unemployed in the Korea. and many of them gave up job search activities due to labor market factors such as lack of hoping jobs. The result is closely related to the lack of total job supply, especially of the white collar job with high demand at each region. Second, the discouraged unemployment issues are clear in young people under 29 years and women with children. The share of them was the highest in the young college graduates, especially in non science and engineering majors, such as humanities and social sciences. In addition, women were basically less disappointing than men, but they were much more likely to be disappointed if they had children under 18 years of age. The issues of discouraged unemployment of these groups were higher in Busan and Ulsan of the southeastern region than Seoul metropolitan area. The chance of being discouraged unemployment of all young people, including college graduates was very clear in Busan, and the chance of women with the children under 18 years was higher in Ulsan. The results reflect regional economic functions and employment structural characteristics. In contrast to Seoul or the metropolitan area with various white collar jobs, Ulsan has a high proportion of male jobs related to production in heavy and chemical industry, and Busan has the labor market with less jobs or small scale service jobs. Therefore, we need various employment policies to solve the problem of discouraged unemployment in general and those for high-educated young people or women with children in particular.