식품소비지출의 불균등도와 양극화 분석

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether the inequality and bi-polarization of income is reflected in the expenditure on food consumption. The inequality index is estimated by measuring the proportion of calculation, and the change of bi-polarization is estimated by the EGR method. Results show that the inequality and EGR index have increased significantly. Although the inequality index of expenditures on food consumption has increased for a little while in 1998, they have not showed considerable changes. And the EGR index has not showed a remarkable increasing tendency since the period of foreign exchange crisis. In the case of food, the Gini's coefficient has a tendency to decrease in common, and in particular, the food service industry has considerably decreased to 0.43 in 2006 from 0.78 in 1982. Generally, many food items show an extremity of bi-polarization since the period of foreign exchange crisis, but do not show significant differences. In the case of the food service industry, it showed of improvement with reference to bi-polarization but deteriorated again in 2006. Therefore, after the foreign exchange crisis, due to deterioration of income distribution system, income inequality and bi-polarization index increased and then decreased after 2003 in Korea. However, the change of income distribution does not have considerable influence on the expenditure of food consumption that has a feature of necessities.