The Korean Journal of Economic Studies
The Impact of Foreign Worker Inflow on the Natives in Korea
Kyungsoo Choi(Korea Development Institute)Year 2013Vol. 61No. 3
Abstract
Influx of foreigners to the Korean labor market raises the proportion ofunskilled labor as the majority of them are low-educated. An anticipatedconsequence is a slowdown of wage and employment growth among thecompeting unskilled natives and consequential widening of skill wage gaps. Tomeasure the impact, this paper takes an aggregate factor proportions approachinstead of impact evaluation method and estimates how a skills compositionchange affects worker status. Workers’ skills levels are defined according totheir education and experience. The need to add experience among the skillsdeterminants is motivated by the diverging wage paths across different agegroups within the same education groups. A perfect substitutability assumptionbetween foreigners and natives within a skills group leads to an estimationresult that shows inflow of foreigners has lowered wage growth of youngunskilled men by as much as 20% in the first decade of the 2000s. Under amore realistic assumption of imperfect substitution, the suppression effect isbetween 10 and 15%. The implication of this study for a mid- to long-termforeign labor policy is that a conservative policy stance is desirable as far asthe unskilled labor inflow is concerned.