The Formation and Reorientation of Low-Income Finance Policy in South Korea, 1950s1960s : The Case of the Seoul Metropolitan Public Pawnshop

This article examines the operation of public pawnshops established and supported at the national level in South Korea after liberation, with a particular focus on the Seoul Municipal Public Pawnshop. Through this case, it seeks to identify changes in South Korea’s low-income finance policies during the 1950s and 1960s. Public pawnshops operated as low-income financial institutions that provided short-term credit at low interest rates. By analyzing the establishment, expansion, and subsequent abolition of public pawnshops within the context of shifts in government financial policy from the 1950s to the 1960s, this study traces broader transformations in contemporaneous low-income finance. Although public pawnshops were established nationwide with active state support during the 1950s, they gradually lost competitiveness in the 1960s amid changes in the financial system and the expansion of private pawnshops, and by the late 1960s most were abolished at the local level. In this respect, public pawnshops can be understood as state-sponsored low-income financial institutions created during a transitional phase, in which low-income finance shifted from direct state provision in the 1950s to reliance on private-sector mechanisms in the 1960s.