earticle

영어

The purpose of the study was to provide the informations about the debt structures of households in 7 metropolitan city areas including Seoul, Busan, Daegu, Daejeon, Incheon, Gwangju and Ulsan. Utilizing the 2003 Korean Labor and Income Panel Study, the debt structures were investigated by the debt holding, debt outstandings, debt types and debt burdens. The debt burdens were examined by debt ratios to income, financial assets and total assets and subjective debt burden. Debts were analyzed in the context of other household economic components such as incomes, expenses and assets.
The results showed that the debt structures of the households were different according to cities where they lived. Debt amount of Seoul was the highest, but the debt status of the households living in Seoul did not seem to be worse than the others. Daegu was found to be the worst city among the cities in terms of the deficiency of household incomes and few amounts of financial assets. The households in Incheon were also in worse status due to the few amounts of financial assets. The results imply that the effective approaches to improve the debt status or to solve the debt problems of households should be taken differently according to the areas and some implications were made in the conclusion.