Those who believe that people lose the will to work when welfare is expanded outnumbered those who do not. In the 2025 20th Korea Welfare Panel Study, 43.8% answered "yes" to this view, 37.1% answered "no," and 19% answered "neutral." The survey was conducted jointly by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (한국보건사회연구원) and the Social Welfare Research Center at Seoul National University (서울대학교 사회복지연구소).
The interesting point is who gave that answer. Among general households, 44.6% agreed that the will to work declines, while among low-income households the figure was 27.9%. The opposing view is reversed, at 39.8% for low-income households and 36.8% for general households. It means that those who have received support and those who have not felt the matter in opposite ways.
This perception runs along the same lines in other survey items. Asked which should come first, growth or distribution, 56.6% put growth ahead and 40.4% put distribution ahead, with growth prevailing among both low-income and general households. On the tax cut item, "neither agree nor disagree" made up the largest block at 44.73%. Public opinion on taxes and welfare appears to rest closer to reservation than to conviction.
Studies that looked at how actual programs moved people's work arrived at a different conclusion. In an analysis of the Earned Income Tax Credit using 2014 data by Yeom Kyung-yun and Jeon Byung-wook, no clear change was detected across the full sample, but when limited to the group most likely to receive the benefit, labor supply was reported to have increased to a statistically meaningful degree. Where support reached, work did not fall but rose.
The care sector is similar. Lee Ji-wan's "Analysis of the Effect of Expanded Childcare Fee Support on Women's Labor Supply" came out in 2022, and found that the rate at which women raising infants and toddlers went out to work rose significantly as childcare fee support widened. Once there were hands to take over the caregiving, room opened up to choose work. Public perception and the findings of empirical analysis diverge from each other.
There is a reason this divergence lands especially hard now. A double crisis of old-age poverty and gaps in care arriving at once has been appearing in newspaper feature pages, and from Japan across the sea came word that applications for public assistance had reached a record high. The specific number of cases and the tally date have not been released in confirmed form, but the signal is clear that in a society where aging has run ahead, more hands are knocking on the last safety net.
Poverty in old age is not explained by a problem of the will to work. It comes after the places to work have disappeared, and it deepens when a spouse or parent in need of care appears. The common belief that welfare breeds idleness showed up more strongly among those who have not been through that situation.
Some things are changing. As surveys like this have begun to break out responses by income group, debate over welfare no longer ends with the lumped-together phrase "public opinion." The gap between 44.6% and 27.9% tells us whose experience has been less present in policy discussion. Narrowing that gap is the starting line for the next round of program design.
