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Research on child poverty in South Korea has documented declining trends over the past two decades, yet most studies rely on income-based measures and stop at trend description. Whether material hardship is systematically patterned by income within child households, and how this varies by household structure, remains largely unexamined. Drawing on 20 waves of nationally representative panel data, this study aims to provide a longitudinal account of material hardship and its income-related concentration across household types in South Korea. Three related questions guide the analysis: how material hardship has differed between child and non-child households over 20 years; whether income-related concentration within child households mirrors or diverges from the full population; and whether the predictive role of household structure on hardship, net of socioeconomic characteristics, has changed over the study period..
Methods
Data were drawn from all 20 waves of the Korean Welfare Panel Study (KOWEPS, 2005-2024; N = 320,142 person-year observations). Material hardship was operationalized as a binary indicator of experiencing any of five dimensions (utility non-payment, heating inability, unmet medical need, housing cost arrears, utility disconnection). Income-related concentration was estimated annually using the Concentration Index (CI). Logistic regression models with household-clustered standard errors were estimated for the full sample and child households separately, controlling for household type (single-person, single-parent, grandparent-headed, two-parent/other), education, economic activity, housing tenure, and regional and year fixed effects. A household type by study period interaction term was included to assess whether structural effects changed over time.
Results
Both child and non-child households experienced dramatic declines in composite hardship prevalence over the study period. Child household rates were initially higher (18.8% vs. 13.6% in 2005), reversed after 2013, then partially re-converged by 2024 (2.0% vs. 1.6%). The CI for child households was consistently more negative than the full-sample CI, with the gap widening substantially in 2018–2020 (CI = −0.799 and −0.811, respectively), indicating greater income-related concentration within this subgroup. In logistic regression models, single-parent households exhibited elevated odds of hardship in both the full sample (OR = 2.09, p < 0.001) and child-household-only models (OR = 2.84, p < 0.001), net of socioeconomic characteristics. Housing tenure was the strongest predictor across all models (OR ≈ 4.0). The household type by period interaction was jointly significant (χ²(6) = 16.81, p = 0.010), with the absolute gap between single-parent and two-parent households narrowing over time while the relative disadvantage of single-parent households persisted.
Conclusions and Implications
Welfare expansion in South Korea has contributed to absolute reductions in material hardship across household types, yet single-parent households retain a substantial and persistent disadvantage that is not explained by income, employment, education, or housing tenure alone. For social work practice and policy, these findings suggest that income transfer programs are insufficient on their own to address the structural vulnerability of single-parent households, and that targeted, family-structure-sensitive interventions in housing stability and labor market support warrant prioritization in child welfare policy.